Hey all, welcome to another SAW! This week(well, week and 1 day...), we have Dark Ride, an amusement-park slasher to watch. So strap in, keep your arms in the ride at all times, and get ready for SPOILERS.....
Wow, this DVD has about a month's worth of trailers and other ads. I hope there's a movie. Wait, did I have this long, stringy beard when we started? I did? Damn!
Okay, so the movie does actually have a starting point. There's a large, deserted-looking carnival, and 2 young girls are just sort of drifting around in the big empty area of the main fairground. A sign says that the place is in its final weeks, but it looks pretty damned dead even without a sign.
One girl, Colleen, lets some sound effects coming from the funhouse attraction intimidate her, and she starts to back away. Her sister mocks her, and Colleen quickly switches her tune. They each buy a ticket from a grizzled old barker, and he teases them a little to try to break the tension. I think I saw him on Dateline 2-3 times...
After getting belted into their cart, they get pulled into a dark, shadowy area, with various noises heard around them. The ride features what you'd probably expect: giant Devil heads bobbing at them, smog, lots of semi-scary mannequins in the background. As the ride goes deeper into the tunnel, things start to spring up and scare them a bit faster.
Colleen hates it. Even during the non-scary stuff, she keep averting her eyes from the entire experience. The other girl doubles her efforts to humiliate Colleen about her squeamishness. Oh, and neither one of the girls manages to notice a creepy figure who enters the tunnel right behind them. Golly gee, I can't possibly imagine where this is heading.
Following Colleen's latest round of being called names, her sister, Sam(I miss Pam Dawber....), appears to have been snatched out of her seat by someone. The dummies also now seem to be fixed up to look like murdered children. As her anxiety increases, Colleen realizes that her cart has now stopped again, in front of another chilling display.
This new one depicts a brutish hulk dressed in hospital scrubs. He's facing a "patient" on his table, as another figure looks on. Colleen gets a better view of the scene, and sees that Sam is the victim, with her innards exposed and pulled out in all of their glory. As Colleen screams, the title is displayed.
During the credits, we also get some backstory. Both girls were murdered, but the killer went on to have a pretty busy hobby. 14 more people were killed...hey, how 'bout showing us THAT movie? That would kick butt.
Anyway, as the film picks up in the present day, 5 friends are preparing for Spring Break festivities. The group consists of Bill, who seems to be the socially awkward "nerd" of the group; Cathy, an attractive brunette played by an actress who co-starred on The Sopranos(she played the daughter); Steve, who used to date Cathy, and is Bill's best friend and roommate; Liz, who is Cathy's bubbly blond best friend; and Jim, an obnoxious jock-type(who used to date Liz) whose van they're travelling in. Yay, the usual assembly-line of victims.
So, after everyone hugs Bill for some reason, they get the proverbial show on the cliche-riddled road. Before they even get into the friggin' van, Bill freaks out the others by re-enacting a scene from Midnight Cowboy, which seems pretty random. They start off on their journey, which consists of scenery from the Griswold family cross-country trip--set to a 70's-ish sounding tune that would make hippies long for heavy metal--and they all just mouth stuff at each other. Yeah yeah, I know it's a montage set to music, I'm just mocking them to stay awake. Hell, even the people who made this one seem bored, as the footage begins to run at super-speed.
They stop at a creepy gas station(yet another cliche....I'm betting Joss whedon was thinking of this movie when he wrote the awesome and under-appreciated Cabin In the Woods), which is open, yet seems deserted. Bill decides to go inside to have a look, and finds an old man who may or may not actually be dead. Bill acts out another movie scene to try to get a reaction from the geezer, but the guy doesn't even blink.
While Bill looks for a bathroom, Jim decides to see if the old guy really is dead by offering him a blowjob as a joke. He gets the shit scared out of him when the old man pops up and begins to talk at 500 words a minute. The old man gives them a coupon for a local eatery, then makes a wisecrack to Jim about getting oral sex from him. I have to admit, the old guy made me laugh.
When Bill returns to the van, he shows the others a brochure that he found, advertising an amusement park attraction at the Jersey Shore. The brochure refers to the attraction as a "dark ride", which prompts Liz to ask what it is. Bill apparently has an encyclopedic knowledge of dark rides, and he fills her in. It's pretty much just another way of saying "funhouse", but that movie title was already taken, so we get Dark Ride. Again, yay. And also....who the heck finds funhouse pamphlets in gas station restrooms??? You should wear a HazMat suit before picking it up.
Steve then adds that he's actually heard of this particular attraction, because of something that happened there 20 years earlier. I can't imagine what he's referring to. Was Snooki born there? Probably not, otherwise this would be even scarier.
Then we get a bit of time travel thrown into the mix, as the story grinds to a halt, and we see an event that took place 2 weeks earlier. Uh, and they couldn't just show this before introducing the college kids to us, and simply have their intro say "2 weeks later"....why exactly? Oh, and this distracting interlude takes place in a mental institution.
2 orderlies are making their nightly rounds, checking on patients in each padded cell. They come to a cell where a bald guy is sitting on the floor in front of a television showing static, and one orderly starts mocking him. When he gets pushy, the patient splits open his straitjacket, then grabs a flashlight from one of the orderlies and shoves it straight through the poor man's torso. Then he grabs the second orderly, shoves him up against the padded door, and tears him open. Afterwards, the lunatic simply leaves the asylum.
Meanwhile, back in the van, Bill has convinced the rest of the group to go visit the dark ride from the brochure, claiming it to be an adventure, or an act of rebellion, or some other load of bull. They probably agreed just to shut him up. Oh, and then they come upon a hitchhiker, and decide to let her come along with them.
The new girl is Jen, and she's kind of spacy at first. Then she tells the others that she once attended a Phish concert, where she met a guy who debated her knowledge of music before trying to rape her. She responded to him by punching him hard in the balls. The moral to her story? She believes that people are more or less decent, deep down. Uhhhh.......
Anyway, while Cathy and Liz text each other about the looney new passenger, Jen decides to take off her shirt. Then Jim offers her a joint, and all is good again. They tell her about the dark ride, and she gets all excited. As a way of thanking them for the ride, Jen offers up a baggy full of many, many hits of acid. Wish they had included one with this movie. I honestly can't remember the last time a horror film left me this bored.
They must have heard me, because they finally arrive at the dark ride. It's late at night, and they seem bamboozled by the fact that it looks like it's closed. They see a security guy, and decide that they can sneak in between his rounds. Well, everyone except Cathy....she's annoyed by Jen, and opts to remain in the van.
Jim breaks in first, gets frightened by a dummy making a face, then finds the fusebox to get the power turned on. With the lights on and the ride operational, he then lets the rest of the group into the building. Pretty smart thinking, having a loud, illuminated amusement park ride turned on in case another security guy or bystander happens to pay a visit.
Now that everyone is together again, the girls are skittish about exploring the interior of the ride. They are reminded that Cathy is outside, if anything goes wrong, but Jen still whines that she would have been safer accepting a ride from a creepy stalker. Geez, considering how long it took them to get to the place, you'd think they would have voiced these issues before their arrival!
They wander aimlessly from room to room, until Jim picks up a mannequin and begins dancing with it. A massive green monster-head pops out of a window behind Jim, and when he turns back to the mannequin, the face is suddenly mangled. He drops it and re-joins the rest of the group, as if nothing happened. Before leaving, Bill examines the broken face as well. From above the room, the escaped killer watches the incident, and he's now wearing a dollface mask, like the killer in The Hills Run Red.
Outside, the weather has turned rainy. Cathy notices the rain, then goes back to not having anything to do with the main plot. I wonder how much she was paid to more or less sit in a car for the majority of the film? I hope it was a ton of cash.
Jim, while smoking a joint, comments that Cathy doesn't know what she's missing. As they decide to sit in a circle and act out a scene from That '70's Show, Liz claims to see someone watching them. The rest just chalk it up to a reaction from the drugs. Yeah, I'm sure that's all it was.
Jim then begins to tell the story of exactly why the dark ride was closed, until he's interrupteed by Bill, who says that he grew up in the area, and knows the "real story". Hey Bill, how 'bout you chill out so Jim can tell the story, before you decide it's the wrong one? Geez, he's starting to get on my nerves.
Regardless of who tells the story(which Jim tells anyway), it's just the same events we saw in the opening sequence of the film. Jim says that the girls were twins, and that the killer had the mental capacity of a child. Oh, and he supposedly lived in the dark ride, due to his deformities.
And how could he have lived there without being discovered? Why, his dad operated the attraction, of course! Oh, and there was a brother who was younger, with no abnormalities, physical or mental. After the twins were murdered, the ride was shut down. When the girls ask Jim why he pretended not to have any knowledge of the place, he responds that they never would have agreed to go, had they known the history of the place.
Okay, Bill's turn to tell the same damned story! In his version, the killer was shot, but survived, and eventually spent the rest of his life in the booby hatch. And the big twist in his story is that the twins were also Bill's cousins. Oh, and the giant killer's name is Jonah. Supposedly, Jonah was discovered turning his victims into displays for the ride. After defusing the tension with a joke, they get up to explore some more.
Steve and Jen find a more private room to fool around in, but it's very dark. They grab a lamp from one of the displays, and use a mirror to try to bounce the light off and give more illumination. Doing this reveals Cathy, who appears to be dead, and used as a display to scare them. As they scream, Cathy leaps up, revealing that a prank was being pulled on Steve.
Steve gets bent out of shape over the joke, then gets angrier when he realizes that most of the others were in on it too. Heck, the whole visit to the attraction was the key component to the prank, and the brochure was one that belonged to Bill. He even talked Jen into helping to pull it off, which she was more than willing to do.
Cathy then makes a crack about paying back Steve for fooling around behind her back when they were dating, and that part really sets him off. He tells Bill that he just lost his only friend, and he leaves. While some of the others say the same to Bill, Jim actually seems to like him a lot more for pulling the stunt. Go figure.
As they arrive back at the entrance, they find that the door is locked from the outside. They all assume that Steve did it, but when they beg him to let them out, there's no response at all. Jim loses his patience, and decides to check the fuses and power source, to see if he can open anything from the control panel.
Within a minute of arriving, Jim is jumped by Jen. Faster than you can say, "Stupid idea!", they start to strip down and have sex. The rest of the remaining group all grab light sources, and walk in a line from room to room, to find any alternate exits. This seems like an okay plan, until Cathy sees a dummy on display that appears to be a very dead-looking Steve. She screams, and Jen and Jim stop screwing long enough to comment on it. Then Jen randomly blurts out, "I love this song,", and the sex resumes.
Cathy rushes to get the others, while Bill tries to warn Jim and Jen that something terrible has occurred. They ignore him, so that Jim can get a blowjob, and the killer sneaks into the room. He kills Jen without alerting Jim, and Jim winds up with her severed head in his hands.
Panicking, he tries to run away, and only succeeds in knocking himself out on an overheard pipe. Jim wakes up, and finds himself alone. Unfortunately, there are no unlocked exits in the room. Trapped, Jim is left crying and begging to be released.
Cathy and Liz are still trying to find an alternate escape door, but neither one of them is being very rational at this point. Cathy tries to inspire Liz to be calm and act strong, going into full-on Braveheart mode to get her friend going again. Cathy sees another corpse, and tells Liz that she feels completely responsible for what's happening to them. She runs back into the maze of rooms, and tells Liz to find the exit and get help.
Each room Liz finds is scarier than the last, until the killer finally nabs her. She barely gets away, but he keeps finding her. He finally gets the drop on her, and then drags her body along the floor to parts unknown. Along the way, Jim sees the body, and the killer decides to chase him down as well.
Meanwhile, the security guy outside has returned. He calls for backup, after describing the screams and other signs of activity coming from the dark ride. After a short debate, he's told that back-up is on the way to his location. Yay, more victims!
The security guard decides to enter the dark ride without waiting for back-up, because they always do in these movies. He finds Cathy almost immediately, which would be great, but the killer has somehow managed to get behind him. The killer splits the poor guard's head in half, right down the middle, and after he admires his handiwork, he resumes chasing Cathy.
Then we meet the "back-up". They receive the call to assist the security guard, and one says something along the lines of, "I hope we get there before he splits..." Hardy har har. The only reason for these 2 nimrods to even be in this movie, was for them to deliver that godawful pun.
Anyway, Cathy finds a window, and actually manages to escape from the building! She swiftly gets to the car, gets in, and drives away fast enough to make The Flash envious. Jim watches her leave, and begins to cry. What's with them finding exits all of a sudden? Were these windows somehow invisible until just now? Gotta love the logic on display in this movie.
Anyway, while Jim is running and blubbering(again, instead of going out a window????), the killer pops up next to him. I love how this gigantic hulk always manages to pop up from out of nowhere, like he's somehow hard to spot. Of course, it makes as much sense as anything else we've seen, so at least the writing is consistent. A giant ninja...genius.
Cathy, in the meantime, is trying to figure out how the "phone" part of her cellphone works. See? Actual evidence that texting makes you dumber. She gets a call from Jim's phone, and realizes that he's still alive. She decides that the smart thing to do is to go back into the dangerous building, and rescue the shit out of the lunkhead. Oh, and while we're talking about survivors, where the heck is Bill, our socially inept movie expert? He pretty much just vanished from the plot after they all went into the building...
Inside, things aren't looking too good for Jim. The masked maniac has caught up to him, and Jim has crawled his way into a dead end. The killer raises his weapon to finish Jim off, but Cathy saves the day by crashing the car through the wall. How she knew which wall to drive through, or even how she managed not to kill Jim in the process, is typical movie logic. Chalk it up to "magic", I guess.
The impact of the vehicle sends the killer flying into a wall of spikes or blades. Cathy passes out, and Jim tries to revive her. And that's when Bill reappears. Jim freaks out and gives Bill a semi-embrace, but Bill's only reaction is to ask if the killer is actually dead. Then he also asks if Cathy is still alive.
When Jim asks Bill how he managed to survive, he replies that he knows the building quite well....and then he stabs Jim. While he continues to stab Jim several more times, flashbacks reveal him planning the prank with Cathy, as well as killing and displaying Steve. It's revealed that the killer is Bill's older brother, and the twin girls were his sisters. Bill wanted to help his brother escape from his confinement, so that he could then kill his "friends", because they never really let him fit in with their group...
...and that's when Cathy finally wakes up. She watches Bill take his brother's mask, and he thanks her for helping with his revenge scheme. Cathy, still in shock, wanders back outside. A few emergency vehicles have arrived, and a resuer asks Cathy if she's hurt. Then there's a final close-up of the mask. THE END
Whoo-boy, this movie was all over the place. A good opening scene, followed by waaaay too much set-up, and numerous silly plot-holes and dumb elements to truly make this film scary. 2 killer trees out of 5....I would have given it 3, but these guys kept blowing every opportunity for something interesting to happen. At least the kills were somewhat good, though, so it's not a total waste. (oh, and check out the deleted scenes....some of them are actually decent, for a change...)
And what did I learn from watching Dark Ride?
-Well, if you want to enjoy a vacation with friends, you might want to do a background check on them first...
-Mental hospitals have no security measures at all, except for a pair of badly trained orderlies.
-Windows and doors are invisible until it's almost too late for them to be useful.
The next movie from Ballbuster is Ghost In the Machine, a cheese-tastic rip-off of Shocker and The Horror Show. See you then!
Sunday, June 17, 2012
Saturday, June 9, 2012
Hell Night
Well, since my movies won't arrive in time for this week's entry, I've decided, once again, to see what YouTube has to offer. Luckily, a few of their slasher choices were new to me...it's always fun to gamble on the unknown! So, prepare to be SPOILED, as I watch something from the early 1980's called Hell Night...
The movie starts smack dab in the middle of a rowdy, drunken bash. Linda Blair stars in this one, hopefully minus the head-spinning and pea soup vomit. There's also Vince Van Patten, so this definitely has the 80's vibe going for it. By the way, if you watch these movie while reading along, watch the volume. The opening rock song is pretty much just a wall of screeching noise.
The first character we meet is Peter, the studly president of the fraternity co-hosting the Halloween party. His costume is some kind of swordsman or something. He turns the charm up past 11, and attempts to woo a pretty girl serving drinks, when his frat brother, Scott--the most awkward-looking pirate ever-- interrupts the conversation.
When Peter looks away for a second, he spots Marti entering the room. She's a new sorority pledge, played by Linda Blair, and she's dressed as some kind of Victorian-era woman or royalty perhaps. She came to the party with a friend dressed in a some kind of leopard dress. Maybe she's supposed to be Wilma Flinstone. Is my complete apathy for this thing showing?
Anyway, according to Wilma, Peter looks forward to the Halloween bash all year. So, given that classes in the fall most likely begin in September, Pete's only excited for roughly 2 months. Unless they mean immediately after the shindig, in which case, he's excited until December 31st, because then he begins a new year. (yeah yeah, I know what she meant, I'm just mocking the movie out of boredom, until something interesting happens.) I need a nap, so my cat, Tom will watch this until I'm up again. Everyone, meet Tom. Tom, everyone.
Meow meow loud music meow drowning out dialogue meow. Entire party drives through town in cars meow, until they reach big iron gate meow. Pete lets them into place called Garth Manor, meow, because new pledges always spend one night inside meow.
Garth Manor was occupied by various Garth family members meow, until the last Girths gave birth to a mutant girl, meow. Then they had another child, who was born blind deaf, and mute. Then a son, Mort, was born. He was a Mongoloid, meow. The father was so upset his deformed children, meow, that he decided to kill himself and his family. When police arrived to check out the place, young boy Mort's body was nowhere to be found....
Thanks, Tom, I'll resume watching. I'm feeling better meow...errrrr, I mean now. Anyway, inside the mansion Peter tells the 4 pledges that they can sleep anywhere they want, with whomever they want, until morning. The 4 pledges are Marti; an annoying British girl named Denise(her first big bit of dialogue, featuring her trying to act "drunk" is painful); Some guy dressed as Robin Hood who looks like Blake on Workaholics; and a guy dressed in a generic-looking 1800's suit suit, named Jeff. I guess the costume budget ran out.
Anyway, after they're locked in for the night, they're handed a gun through the iron gate, in case they run into trouble. Then everyone else races away into the night.
The four pledges head inside, where Denise reveals that she snuck in some alcohol and drugs. She and Robin Hood run upstairs to fool around, leaving the other 2 alone. Jeff and Marti together downstairs. Jeff gets the fireplace going, while Marti lights candles.
Then they decide to fight. Marti sees Jeff as nothing more than a spoiled rich kid, while he sees her as a tight-ass liberal. Wait, didn't Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan already play these 2 in a movie? I wonder if they'll keep debating each other as the killer strikes?
Upstairs, the action is even worse. While Diane crawls around on the big bed, Robin Hood is distracted by his desire to shoot arrows at different things around the room. This culminates in him shooting an arrow at her ass. Then when he jumps her bones, she'd rather talk about his love of surfing. Using her body as a surfboard, he demonstrates what hitting the waves is like for him.
Outside the house, Peter, Scott and Wilma show up. They've returned to scare the pledges, and try to make them escape before morning. Peter sends Scott and the cheetah to the other side of the house, while he sets up some stuff on his side.
Back in the study, Marti asks Jeff why he's friends with the jerky frat guys, and he tries to list their good qualities. Then he turns the tables, and asks her, if she hates the fraternity/sorority tradition so much, then why is she pledging? She explains that she did it to hopefully get a circle of friends going on campus. In fact, she's a shoo-in to join, because she struck a deal with the sorority:if she helps them on papers and tests, she's in as their sister.
Then someone screams for , like, a fortnight. We discover that Robin Hood is named Seth. Even his date didn't know that, as she'd been calling him Wes. Boy, it sure is nice to root for smart characters for a change...
Anyway, let's get back to the screaming. The pledges hear another one upstairs, so they head up, and find the wire connected to the speakers that the noise was coming from. Jeff fiddles around with it, and Peter(on the roof) realizes that his control box for the sound effects is no longer working.
Frustrated, Peter asks Wilma Flintstone to go around the mansion, to rig another prank. She starts whining about wanting to stay and watch the prank. When she leaves the guys make fun of her. Nice.
Wilma is sneaking around, when she hears a noise. It turned out to be a big, scary completely innocent owl. Hey, have you ever noticed that owls are in the majority of these outdoor scenes in horror movies, but you almost never see one in real life?
Oops, while I was distracted by that, Wilma was being dragged down into a hole that was covered by leaves. She sees her attacker and screams, and the killer then chops her head off. It goes by fast, so don't blink until you see Marti in the next scene.
Marti and Jeff finally seem to be getting along....and that's when the loud screaming resumes. Jeff tells Marti to stay by the fireplace until he returns. In the main hall, he sees Seth, wearing the goofiest pair of boxers that money can buy. After a quick chuckle, he asks Seth to help him find the pranksters.
While waiting for Jeff's return, Marti gets pretty spooked. She finds the door locked, then hears a noise behind her...it's a...it's a....g-g-g-g-g-GHOST!!! And it's limping very slowly in her direction! My god, I haven't been this scared since that one time my girlfriend bought a pregnancy test, and....um, never mind.
Anyway, Velma found a ghost, but Scooby and Shaggy haven't come to the rescue yet. As the zombiesque spirit creeps ever closer, Marti finally forces the door open, and nearly knocks over Jeff and Seth. While Jeff plans to return to the bedroom for some hanky-panky. Peter goes back into the study with Marti, where he has her recreate what happened.
Outside again. Scott and Peter open a hidden passageway. They're getting ready to set the scene of another prank, involving a dummy head, wearing a rubber mask...If this one ever gets a remake, let's hope that they get rid of most of the prank crap, add more pledges, and have a steadier pace with the kills. I'm practically asleep here.
Up next, Marti watches Jeff climb a tree. He finds the control that locks and unlocks the door, and disables it. Then he goes into Jennifer Love Hewitt mode, and shouts a warning to Peter and Scott, that he'll find them and kick their collective asses if the pranks don't stop soon.
Scott sets up the dummy, and hears a noise. Then the screen goes black, which is as helpful as it sounds. Luckily it doesn't last long, as we see that the killer has hidden in FRONT of Scott. It's as if even the killer knows how brain-dead these guys are, and is siding with the audience.
Anyway, Scott finally realizes that someone is hiding behind the structure in front of him. He stands up to take a closer look, and assumes that it's someone trying to trick him. When he turns back to setting up the prank, a hand grabs his face. The killer then uses his other hand, and Scott gets his neck broken, as well as his head getting some swivel action.
In another bedroom, Marti and Jeff look for more wires and pranks. Then they botch a jump-scare by allowing us to glimpse a fake skeleton through the ajar bathroom door, seconds before the door is opened by Jeff. D'oh! He jumps, then gets rejected by Marti when he tries to get into her bed. Ain't your night, Jeffster.
Back together in another bedroom, Seth and Diane are asleep, but she wakes up with a start. "Little ditty, 'bout Seth and Diane/2 American kids, doin'the best they caaaan/ Jeff's gonna be a surfboard star/Diane'll be an annoying drunk, in the backseat of Jeff's pot-smelling car!"
*takes a bow*
Anyway, so Diane's awake. She's out of alcohol, so she decides to explore the mansion in her sexy lingerie. She grabs a candle and heads for the hall verrrrrrry slooooooowly, and pauses to look around. Oops, she wasn't going out of the room, she's in a bathroom.
As she looks through the drawers and cabinets in the bathroom, someone is seen behind the mirror, watching her. It's Peter, using that secret passage. He goes back outside, When he calls out to his cohorts, there's no answer. He climbs to the roof to look for Scott, and flashes his light around. He then trips over Scott's body, thinking that it's the dummy.
The killer watches from the shadows, as Peter turns a crank attached to a booby trap or prank of some kind. Then he sees a body, and scrambles to get off of the roof. Back on the ground, he heads straight to the front gate. He fumbles with the key, then finally manages to get the gate open.
Unfortunately, his fumble with the keys cost precious time. The killer attacks, starting with another face-palm maneuver. Then he and Peter scuffle, until Peter manages to get away. He runs into the night, only to get lost in some kind of hedge maze. After going around a few corners, Peter sees someone lurking in the shadows, and runs the opposite way. Of course, he runs right into the killer, who uses a scythe to kill the young man.
Marti puts a light on, which wakes up Jeff. She admits that the ghost image really messed her up, which leads to a quick discussion about how he believes in elves, and she believes in ghosts. Then they decide to make out for a little bit.
Seth and Diane are much further along, even though she has to keep reminding Seth what her name is. The killer seems to be watching them, from a room where the door is ajar. As they start delving into cheap porn territory, the camera keeps showing us the half-open door.
After a minute or so of this, Seth gets up to go grab a beer, or pee, or whatever. The killer tiptoes to the bed, and there's an eerie shot of him standing right next to Diane, who has drifted to sleep. The killer fiddles around for a bit, then covers her mouth when she wakes up and sees him there.
In the bathroom, Seth admires his reflection, before heading back to Diane. He gets in bed, only to discover that her throat has been slashed, and her skin is ghostly-white. Seth is horrified, and his shouting gets the attention of Marti and Jeff. They ask him what happened, then run into the room to see for themselves.
Well, I was wrong. In a wider shot, it shows that Diane's head is in the bed, sans body. Seth runs out of the house, and the others follow him. He tries to shoot the padlock on the gate(wait...who locked it back up???), then decides to climb over it. The points on top of the gate are razor sharp, and Seth tries to slowly climb over them, to avoid being impaled.
Despite being jabbed a few times, Seth makes it. After he leaves, the remaining couple clutch each other, and try not to panic. They agree to head back inside, because they're both blithering idiots. Oh, and the background music as they walk back to the mansion is a gigantic ripoff of the Halloween theme, and it takes them a century to open the front door.
Finally back inside, they start to shout out names. Rather thoughtful of them, to give the killer time to hone in on their location. They do more of that slow creeping. Oh, and they find the body of one of the frat boys. Scott, maybe.
They both see something outside, and Jeff is determined to track the person down. Marti begs him not to leave her alone again, but he does anyway. Bastard! He finds Peter dead and runs away, never noticing the keys on the body. D'oh!
Seth gets to the police station, which is really impressive for a dork. He tries to tell the desk Sergeant what happened, but the cops have had their hands full all night, mostly handling pranksters. Seth insists that he's very serious, but the cops threaten to arrest him if be doesn't leave.
Seth prepares to stomp off, but sees a room that is fikked with guns, and is unlocked. He grabs an assault rifle, grabs some ammo, then climbs out of a window. Wow, it's like Superbad mixed with Rambo!
Still hiding in their bedroom, Marti and Jeff talk about whether or not they'll survive long enough for Seth to return. Then a figure arrives, wearing a black shroud. Marti screams, and Jeff uses a pitchfork to stab the gut, They slowly approach the body and lift the shroud, but there's no one there! There is, however, a trapdoor hanging open.
Taking very little time for discussion, the couple decide to follow the killer, even after Jeff tries to leave her behind again. I'm seriously starting to wonder if Jeff is actively trying to bait the killer, by using Marti as a sacrifice. He never seems to think about what might happen to her if she were alone with the killer. Or maybe it's all he thinks about...
Anyway, the underground tunnel is extremely narrow. They finally find a room, but it's darker than The Dark Knight, Darkness Falls, and The Darkest Hour, all rolled into one. They enter the room. There's another section to explore, so on they go. Turning another corner, they discover all of the people the killer has dispatched, some who seem quite old and dusty. There are also framed pictures, possibly representing other victims.
Then they hear someone coming in behind them, so they go into panic mode. They run away quickly, but the killer can always be heard close behind. They finally get back to the secret door, and run outside, where they try to find something to bar the door lever with.
Then we see a liquor store. Huh? Shouldn't they finish the previous scene before they start a new one? Anyway, that's where Seth is. He carjacks a poor guy with the fake rifle, then tells the man the address to send the cops to, if they want to arrest him.
Seth stops at the gate, and worries over how quiet it suddenly seems. He squeezes through some bars, and heads in the direction of the mansion. Uhhhh, if he could squeeze through the bars, then what was the climbing scene about?
So, as he sneaks up to the mansion, the killer reveals that he was hiding above Seth. He tries to choke the young man, but Seth gets in one shot with his rifle. The wrestle for a minute, and twice Seth tries to grab the rifle, but is dragged away from it by our mysterious maniac.
Well, the 3rd time's the charm. Seth gets the rifle and shoots the killer in the chest, and the body gets blown back into a pool of water. As Seth wanders around the pool to look for the killer, the body rises back to the surface. but still appears to be dead.
Seth is so happy, that he limp-runs the entire way to the mansion. He screams "I did it! I did it!", and his friends come out of the bedroom to see him. As they watch him celebrate in the front hall, they ask him about the encounter and a hand snatches Seth away, like something a villain might do in a film from the '30's, after some cackling and moustache-twirling.
Another shot is fired, then the gun is flung back into the front hall. When Seth fails to answer their calls, Marti announces that's going to grab the gun. It was just a lure, of course, because the killer was waiting to grab anyone who went for the weapon. He lunges at Marti, and she runs back to the 2nd floor.
Jeff and Marti race into the bedroom, then brace themselves against the door to keep the killer out. He punches his fist through the door, and grabs at Marti, but she and Jeff escape yet again. Oh, and this is where we finally get a real look at the killer. Imagine Peter Weller in Robocop, after the shooting, and he bought a dark business suit at Goodwill. Or maybe John Lithgow, wearing the Young Frankenstein costume.
Marti and Jeff exit through a window, where Marti is clinging to a weather vane. Jeff is dragged back inside by the weird killer, where he is lifted off the ground, and hurled out another window. Jeff's a-flyin' and a-dyin'!...well, it certainly looks like he died. We'll have to see if he pops up at the end...
Marti doesn't want to die on the roof, so she uses the rope ladder to get off of the house. About halfway down, Marti is attacked by the killer, whose hands burst through a window to strangle her. She leaps to the ground, and runs toward the gate. She then fills in the role of "Scared Girl Who Finds Her Friends Dead" (Yup, even Jeff....so I guess my idea for a twist was wrong.) As that part ends, she fixes one of the cars, and tries to bash the gate apart.
The killer has another plan. His ghostly face pops up in her windshield, and Marti tries swerving to loosen his position on the hood. Those kooky gate spikes fall, sticking the killer to the car like a butterfly in some science class display.
The next morning, Marti finds herself still among the living. She squeezes out of the car and starts to leave it behind, and that's about it. It seemed like they were setting up a final scare as the credits started, but nothing happened. THE END
Man, this one had many, many flaws. But it also had a lot of kills, and a good location I read tonight that there is a remake coming....let's hope they do what I suggested...especially the part about toning down, or eliminating, the pranks, in favor of more victims, and actual slasher scenes that involve practical effects.
Oh, and what I learn from Hell Night?
-In Hollywood,love is definitely blind.
-folks at keg pareties dress up in the cheapest costumes they can find.
-Rock music can kill.
Next week, is hopefully Dark Ride. If not, then another
The movie starts smack dab in the middle of a rowdy, drunken bash. Linda Blair stars in this one, hopefully minus the head-spinning and pea soup vomit. There's also Vince Van Patten, so this definitely has the 80's vibe going for it. By the way, if you watch these movie while reading along, watch the volume. The opening rock song is pretty much just a wall of screeching noise.
The first character we meet is Peter, the studly president of the fraternity co-hosting the Halloween party. His costume is some kind of swordsman or something. He turns the charm up past 11, and attempts to woo a pretty girl serving drinks, when his frat brother, Scott--the most awkward-looking pirate ever-- interrupts the conversation.
When Peter looks away for a second, he spots Marti entering the room. She's a new sorority pledge, played by Linda Blair, and she's dressed as some kind of Victorian-era woman or royalty perhaps. She came to the party with a friend dressed in a some kind of leopard dress. Maybe she's supposed to be Wilma Flinstone. Is my complete apathy for this thing showing?
Anyway, according to Wilma, Peter looks forward to the Halloween bash all year. So, given that classes in the fall most likely begin in September, Pete's only excited for roughly 2 months. Unless they mean immediately after the shindig, in which case, he's excited until December 31st, because then he begins a new year. (yeah yeah, I know what she meant, I'm just mocking the movie out of boredom, until something interesting happens.) I need a nap, so my cat, Tom will watch this until I'm up again. Everyone, meet Tom. Tom, everyone.
Meow meow loud music meow drowning out dialogue meow. Entire party drives through town in cars meow, until they reach big iron gate meow. Pete lets them into place called Garth Manor, meow, because new pledges always spend one night inside meow.
Garth Manor was occupied by various Garth family members meow, until the last Girths gave birth to a mutant girl, meow. Then they had another child, who was born blind deaf, and mute. Then a son, Mort, was born. He was a Mongoloid, meow. The father was so upset his deformed children, meow, that he decided to kill himself and his family. When police arrived to check out the place, young boy Mort's body was nowhere to be found....
Thanks, Tom, I'll resume watching. I'm feeling better meow...errrrr, I mean now. Anyway, inside the mansion Peter tells the 4 pledges that they can sleep anywhere they want, with whomever they want, until morning. The 4 pledges are Marti; an annoying British girl named Denise(her first big bit of dialogue, featuring her trying to act "drunk" is painful); Some guy dressed as Robin Hood who looks like Blake on Workaholics; and a guy dressed in a generic-looking 1800's suit suit, named Jeff. I guess the costume budget ran out.
Anyway, after they're locked in for the night, they're handed a gun through the iron gate, in case they run into trouble. Then everyone else races away into the night.
The four pledges head inside, where Denise reveals that she snuck in some alcohol and drugs. She and Robin Hood run upstairs to fool around, leaving the other 2 alone. Jeff and Marti together downstairs. Jeff gets the fireplace going, while Marti lights candles.
Then they decide to fight. Marti sees Jeff as nothing more than a spoiled rich kid, while he sees her as a tight-ass liberal. Wait, didn't Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan already play these 2 in a movie? I wonder if they'll keep debating each other as the killer strikes?
Upstairs, the action is even worse. While Diane crawls around on the big bed, Robin Hood is distracted by his desire to shoot arrows at different things around the room. This culminates in him shooting an arrow at her ass. Then when he jumps her bones, she'd rather talk about his love of surfing. Using her body as a surfboard, he demonstrates what hitting the waves is like for him.
Outside the house, Peter, Scott and Wilma show up. They've returned to scare the pledges, and try to make them escape before morning. Peter sends Scott and the cheetah to the other side of the house, while he sets up some stuff on his side.
Back in the study, Marti asks Jeff why he's friends with the jerky frat guys, and he tries to list their good qualities. Then he turns the tables, and asks her, if she hates the fraternity/sorority tradition so much, then why is she pledging? She explains that she did it to hopefully get a circle of friends going on campus. In fact, she's a shoo-in to join, because she struck a deal with the sorority:if she helps them on papers and tests, she's in as their sister.
Then someone screams for , like, a fortnight. We discover that Robin Hood is named Seth. Even his date didn't know that, as she'd been calling him Wes. Boy, it sure is nice to root for smart characters for a change...
Anyway, let's get back to the screaming. The pledges hear another one upstairs, so they head up, and find the wire connected to the speakers that the noise was coming from. Jeff fiddles around with it, and Peter(on the roof) realizes that his control box for the sound effects is no longer working.
Frustrated, Peter asks Wilma Flintstone to go around the mansion, to rig another prank. She starts whining about wanting to stay and watch the prank. When she leaves the guys make fun of her. Nice.
Wilma is sneaking around, when she hears a noise. It turned out to be a big, scary completely innocent owl. Hey, have you ever noticed that owls are in the majority of these outdoor scenes in horror movies, but you almost never see one in real life?
Oops, while I was distracted by that, Wilma was being dragged down into a hole that was covered by leaves. She sees her attacker and screams, and the killer then chops her head off. It goes by fast, so don't blink until you see Marti in the next scene.
Marti and Jeff finally seem to be getting along....and that's when the loud screaming resumes. Jeff tells Marti to stay by the fireplace until he returns. In the main hall, he sees Seth, wearing the goofiest pair of boxers that money can buy. After a quick chuckle, he asks Seth to help him find the pranksters.
While waiting for Jeff's return, Marti gets pretty spooked. She finds the door locked, then hears a noise behind her...it's a...it's a....g-g-g-g-g-GHOST!!! And it's limping very slowly in her direction! My god, I haven't been this scared since that one time my girlfriend bought a pregnancy test, and....um, never mind.
Anyway, Velma found a ghost, but Scooby and Shaggy haven't come to the rescue yet. As the zombiesque spirit creeps ever closer, Marti finally forces the door open, and nearly knocks over Jeff and Seth. While Jeff plans to return to the bedroom for some hanky-panky. Peter goes back into the study with Marti, where he has her recreate what happened.
Outside again. Scott and Peter open a hidden passageway. They're getting ready to set the scene of another prank, involving a dummy head, wearing a rubber mask...If this one ever gets a remake, let's hope that they get rid of most of the prank crap, add more pledges, and have a steadier pace with the kills. I'm practically asleep here.
Up next, Marti watches Jeff climb a tree. He finds the control that locks and unlocks the door, and disables it. Then he goes into Jennifer Love Hewitt mode, and shouts a warning to Peter and Scott, that he'll find them and kick their collective asses if the pranks don't stop soon.
Scott sets up the dummy, and hears a noise. Then the screen goes black, which is as helpful as it sounds. Luckily it doesn't last long, as we see that the killer has hidden in FRONT of Scott. It's as if even the killer knows how brain-dead these guys are, and is siding with the audience.
Anyway, Scott finally realizes that someone is hiding behind the structure in front of him. He stands up to take a closer look, and assumes that it's someone trying to trick him. When he turns back to setting up the prank, a hand grabs his face. The killer then uses his other hand, and Scott gets his neck broken, as well as his head getting some swivel action.
In another bedroom, Marti and Jeff look for more wires and pranks. Then they botch a jump-scare by allowing us to glimpse a fake skeleton through the ajar bathroom door, seconds before the door is opened by Jeff. D'oh! He jumps, then gets rejected by Marti when he tries to get into her bed. Ain't your night, Jeffster.
Back together in another bedroom, Seth and Diane are asleep, but she wakes up with a start. "Little ditty, 'bout Seth and Diane/2 American kids, doin'the best they caaaan/ Jeff's gonna be a surfboard star/Diane'll be an annoying drunk, in the backseat of Jeff's pot-smelling car!"
*takes a bow*
Anyway, so Diane's awake. She's out of alcohol, so she decides to explore the mansion in her sexy lingerie. She grabs a candle and heads for the hall verrrrrrry slooooooowly, and pauses to look around. Oops, she wasn't going out of the room, she's in a bathroom.
As she looks through the drawers and cabinets in the bathroom, someone is seen behind the mirror, watching her. It's Peter, using that secret passage. He goes back outside, When he calls out to his cohorts, there's no answer. He climbs to the roof to look for Scott, and flashes his light around. He then trips over Scott's body, thinking that it's the dummy.
The killer watches from the shadows, as Peter turns a crank attached to a booby trap or prank of some kind. Then he sees a body, and scrambles to get off of the roof. Back on the ground, he heads straight to the front gate. He fumbles with the key, then finally manages to get the gate open.
Unfortunately, his fumble with the keys cost precious time. The killer attacks, starting with another face-palm maneuver. Then he and Peter scuffle, until Peter manages to get away. He runs into the night, only to get lost in some kind of hedge maze. After going around a few corners, Peter sees someone lurking in the shadows, and runs the opposite way. Of course, he runs right into the killer, who uses a scythe to kill the young man.
Marti puts a light on, which wakes up Jeff. She admits that the ghost image really messed her up, which leads to a quick discussion about how he believes in elves, and she believes in ghosts. Then they decide to make out for a little bit.
Seth and Diane are much further along, even though she has to keep reminding Seth what her name is. The killer seems to be watching them, from a room where the door is ajar. As they start delving into cheap porn territory, the camera keeps showing us the half-open door.
After a minute or so of this, Seth gets up to go grab a beer, or pee, or whatever. The killer tiptoes to the bed, and there's an eerie shot of him standing right next to Diane, who has drifted to sleep. The killer fiddles around for a bit, then covers her mouth when she wakes up and sees him there.
In the bathroom, Seth admires his reflection, before heading back to Diane. He gets in bed, only to discover that her throat has been slashed, and her skin is ghostly-white. Seth is horrified, and his shouting gets the attention of Marti and Jeff. They ask him what happened, then run into the room to see for themselves.
Well, I was wrong. In a wider shot, it shows that Diane's head is in the bed, sans body. Seth runs out of the house, and the others follow him. He tries to shoot the padlock on the gate(wait...who locked it back up???), then decides to climb over it. The points on top of the gate are razor sharp, and Seth tries to slowly climb over them, to avoid being impaled.
Despite being jabbed a few times, Seth makes it. After he leaves, the remaining couple clutch each other, and try not to panic. They agree to head back inside, because they're both blithering idiots. Oh, and the background music as they walk back to the mansion is a gigantic ripoff of the Halloween theme, and it takes them a century to open the front door.
Finally back inside, they start to shout out names. Rather thoughtful of them, to give the killer time to hone in on their location. They do more of that slow creeping. Oh, and they find the body of one of the frat boys. Scott, maybe.
They both see something outside, and Jeff is determined to track the person down. Marti begs him not to leave her alone again, but he does anyway. Bastard! He finds Peter dead and runs away, never noticing the keys on the body. D'oh!
Seth gets to the police station, which is really impressive for a dork. He tries to tell the desk Sergeant what happened, but the cops have had their hands full all night, mostly handling pranksters. Seth insists that he's very serious, but the cops threaten to arrest him if be doesn't leave.
Seth prepares to stomp off, but sees a room that is fikked with guns, and is unlocked. He grabs an assault rifle, grabs some ammo, then climbs out of a window. Wow, it's like Superbad mixed with Rambo!
Still hiding in their bedroom, Marti and Jeff talk about whether or not they'll survive long enough for Seth to return. Then a figure arrives, wearing a black shroud. Marti screams, and Jeff uses a pitchfork to stab the gut, They slowly approach the body and lift the shroud, but there's no one there! There is, however, a trapdoor hanging open.
Taking very little time for discussion, the couple decide to follow the killer, even after Jeff tries to leave her behind again. I'm seriously starting to wonder if Jeff is actively trying to bait the killer, by using Marti as a sacrifice. He never seems to think about what might happen to her if she were alone with the killer. Or maybe it's all he thinks about...
Anyway, the underground tunnel is extremely narrow. They finally find a room, but it's darker than The Dark Knight, Darkness Falls, and The Darkest Hour, all rolled into one. They enter the room. There's another section to explore, so on they go. Turning another corner, they discover all of the people the killer has dispatched, some who seem quite old and dusty. There are also framed pictures, possibly representing other victims.
Then they hear someone coming in behind them, so they go into panic mode. They run away quickly, but the killer can always be heard close behind. They finally get back to the secret door, and run outside, where they try to find something to bar the door lever with.
Then we see a liquor store. Huh? Shouldn't they finish the previous scene before they start a new one? Anyway, that's where Seth is. He carjacks a poor guy with the fake rifle, then tells the man the address to send the cops to, if they want to arrest him.
Seth stops at the gate, and worries over how quiet it suddenly seems. He squeezes through some bars, and heads in the direction of the mansion. Uhhhh, if he could squeeze through the bars, then what was the climbing scene about?
So, as he sneaks up to the mansion, the killer reveals that he was hiding above Seth. He tries to choke the young man, but Seth gets in one shot with his rifle. The wrestle for a minute, and twice Seth tries to grab the rifle, but is dragged away from it by our mysterious maniac.
Well, the 3rd time's the charm. Seth gets the rifle and shoots the killer in the chest, and the body gets blown back into a pool of water. As Seth wanders around the pool to look for the killer, the body rises back to the surface. but still appears to be dead.
Seth is so happy, that he limp-runs the entire way to the mansion. He screams "I did it! I did it!", and his friends come out of the bedroom to see him. As they watch him celebrate in the front hall, they ask him about the encounter and a hand snatches Seth away, like something a villain might do in a film from the '30's, after some cackling and moustache-twirling.
Another shot is fired, then the gun is flung back into the front hall. When Seth fails to answer their calls, Marti announces that's going to grab the gun. It was just a lure, of course, because the killer was waiting to grab anyone who went for the weapon. He lunges at Marti, and she runs back to the 2nd floor.
Jeff and Marti race into the bedroom, then brace themselves against the door to keep the killer out. He punches his fist through the door, and grabs at Marti, but she and Jeff escape yet again. Oh, and this is where we finally get a real look at the killer. Imagine Peter Weller in Robocop, after the shooting, and he bought a dark business suit at Goodwill. Or maybe John Lithgow, wearing the Young Frankenstein costume.
Marti and Jeff exit through a window, where Marti is clinging to a weather vane. Jeff is dragged back inside by the weird killer, where he is lifted off the ground, and hurled out another window. Jeff's a-flyin' and a-dyin'!...well, it certainly looks like he died. We'll have to see if he pops up at the end...
Marti doesn't want to die on the roof, so she uses the rope ladder to get off of the house. About halfway down, Marti is attacked by the killer, whose hands burst through a window to strangle her. She leaps to the ground, and runs toward the gate. She then fills in the role of "Scared Girl Who Finds Her Friends Dead" (Yup, even Jeff....so I guess my idea for a twist was wrong.) As that part ends, she fixes one of the cars, and tries to bash the gate apart.
The killer has another plan. His ghostly face pops up in her windshield, and Marti tries swerving to loosen his position on the hood. Those kooky gate spikes fall, sticking the killer to the car like a butterfly in some science class display.
The next morning, Marti finds herself still among the living. She squeezes out of the car and starts to leave it behind, and that's about it. It seemed like they were setting up a final scare as the credits started, but nothing happened. THE END
Man, this one had many, many flaws. But it also had a lot of kills, and a good location I read tonight that there is a remake coming....let's hope they do what I suggested...especially the part about toning down, or eliminating, the pranks, in favor of more victims, and actual slasher scenes that involve practical effects.
Oh, and what I learn from Hell Night?
-In Hollywood,love is definitely blind.
-folks at keg pareties dress up in the cheapest costumes they can find.
-Rock music can kill.
Next week, is hopefully Dark Ride. If not, then another
Saturday, June 2, 2012
Chain Letter
So it's nearly the weekend, which means my next slasher finally arrived. Luckily, I've found some rare ones to watch on YouTube, so if BallBuster keeps pulling this "waiting a week before the DVD arrives" crap, I have a couple of choices to fall back on. Anyway, this week', we're watching Chain Letter, which sounds like it falls into the "urban legend" genre somewhere. As usual, there will be SPOILERS...
Right off the bat, the movie throws a quote at us..."Life is a chain of dark events." That's strange, because I thought it was like a box of chocolate. Great, another message just popped up: WE ARE ALL CONNECTED...Terrific. Now stop yelling, and start the stupid movie...
Okay, so after several annoying and random-seeming establishing shots, there's a reporter on a TV discussing a killing spree involving several teen victims. A woman is watching the report, but then we go to some anonymous person holding a syringe and pulling on a group of suspended chains. The movie then continues to alternate between the two, , until we see the chain fetish person tying someone to the chains by their ankles and wrists.
The woman is joined by her husband, who has made her some coffee. As the husband gets distracted by the news, the wife asks him to switch it off. Then we return to the person who was chained up, just as they regain consciousness. They can't yell or scream, though...the killer has secured their face with duct tap, leaving only room to breath through their nose, and a rectangle to see through.
The victim begins to panic, and realizes that the chains are attached to 2 cars in the driveway. The cars begin to descend the driveway, and the victim is painfully dragged through the closed garage door. Then both stop for other traffic.
During the pause, the husband decides to turn on his radio and crank up the volume. The wife, from her vehicle, sees the person chained to the cars, and rolls her window down to warn her husband. He doesn't hear her, of course, and takes off...killing the poor victim in the driveway. Then the credits start up.
During the credits, there are several more news reports. The first few are about an anti-technology group trying to infect and disable as many computers as they can, through the usual e-mail viruses and hacking attempts. Then the stories become about a soldier in Iraq who was tracked, captured, then tortured, all because the terrorists who nabbed him were able to find him using his cell phone signal. The final image in the montage implies that the tortured soldier is involved with the anti-technology group.
Then the movie plunges into Saw territory, showing someone held captive in a green room.
Well, apparently that was a scene from the wrong movie, because it ends as abruptly as it began. The NEXT random scene begins with a phone call between 2 teen girls, Jessie and Rachel. Jessie likes a boy they've been friends with since childhood, and Rachel reluctantly agrees to help her try to catch his eye. Is this still Chain Letter, or did I somehow begin watching Sweet Valley High?
At school, we meet Johnny and Mikey. They talk about another friend, Kevin, who was accepted by a college in Nebraska. Then Rachel shows up, and tells them that Adam dumped OH MY GOD WILL YOU JUST START HAVING A PLOT, YOU STUPID MOVIE???? Seriously, this thing's taking years off of my life with all of this inane chatter.
Well, apparently this movie wants me dead, because now we have a guy named Neil, who is Rachel's brother I guess. He yells at her for telling their mother about his masturbation habits, and half the school hears him. Then, as the scene finally comes to an end, a guy named Dan shows up, and gives Rachel a rose. I just don't care anymore. I hope they all die in one big earthquake together. Or I do, before the closing credits roll.
And now we get a dose of greatness, as Brad Dourif shows up in the movie. He plays a quirky(duh) professor, and he's delivering a lecture to the cast about how intrusive technology is in our lives. To prove his point, he taps a small device that emits an EMP, rendering the class textless. Good for him! I wish I had one of those every time I went out to the multiplex. Or, hell, anywhere.
He continues to insist that people are far too willing to give up their privacy to stay connected to each other 24/7, so Jessie raises the point that it makes the world safer to have so much open communication between devices. The teacher argues back that it also makes it easier for people to intrude on our lives, if we share too much of ourselves. Hmmm.....
Neil, our chronic masturbator, is seen playing an MMO by himself. Good to know that he can use more than 1 kind of joystick, I guess. Anyway, he's busy killing someone's online avatar, when a text message blocks his view of the game.
It turns out to be a message from our chain-loving killer, although Neil doesn't know that yet. The message says that he is "the first link in the chain", and then you get the usual nonsense about sending the mail forward to whatever arbitrary number the sender makes up, or else blah blah blah.
Before Neil can even finish reading the message, Rachel enters his bedroom. She insists that she needs access to his computer for a minute, because her phone went screwy or something. When she sees the chain letter, she quickly sends it to her friends, and then Neil adds her name to the list when she exits. So I guess the number was "5", in this case.
Oh, and there was something else that was dumb that I neglected to mention: Neil's computer has this magic ability to tell him if he has "mail" or "chain mail". I think I would keel over in shocked disbelief if I ever came across a Hollywood movie that understood how thing like computers and the Internet actually work.
When she meets up with her friends, Rachel discovers that some have received the chain letter already, and at least one was deleted. She leaves to use the restroom, but ends up out in an alley Quick, escape to a better film while you still can!.
Johnny, the guy who deleted his chain mail, meets up with Kevin at the gym. They discuss their plans for college(kind of "eh"), then Kevin decides to head back home. After Johnny runs on a treadmill, the killer knocks him out from behind.
Johnny wakes up as the killer is piercing his limbs with hooks, then attaching the hooks to chains. While Johnny cries and screams, the killer raises him off the grounds, then drops him again. Then the killer wraps numerous chains around his face, until he gets several disfiguring injuries. After several quick flashes of the killer torturing him, Johnny dies.
The detectives on the case(one of whom is scream queen Betsy Palmer) theorize that the killer must have drugged him when he got up from excercising to grab some water. The killer left no prints, so the cops look through the victim's locker for clues. They don't find anything relevant to the murder, but they discover that our dead jock might have been using steroids.
The funeral takes place in the rain, as movie funerals almost always do. Detective Crenshaw(the one NOT played by Betsy Palmer) shows up after the service to ask some questions. Despite his urgent tone, none of them can think of anyone who wanted Johnny dead.
More rain, and more generic rock music. Dan and a buddy are admiring the progress he's making on a car restoration project. The friend goes to the back to grab somer drinks, and Dan hears a noise from that general location.
When Dan investigates, he can't find his pal, so he returns to his pet project. Sitting behind the wheel, he fantasizes about how much fun the car will be, then he decides to look under the hood.
The engine block is hanging over the car on a chain(!), so Dan begins to fiddle with some bits and pieces. Unexpectedly, the chain loosens, and the engine decapitates Dan. The chain killer strikes again! Boy, that sure was an unexpected development!
More rain, more detective work. The investigators finally figured out that all of the victims were taking the same class, and were friends. If they had a Genius Trophy for sleuthing, this pair would be a shoo-in to get the thing.
Back in class, the teacher gives his students about 10 seconds to mourn. With all that bothersome human emotion out of the way, he then reminds the students that their midterm papers are due Monday. Wow, what a nice guy.
When he dismisses the class, the teacher asks Jessie to stay behind. He probably wants to dock her a letter grade for blinking or breathing too often, but it turns out that he wants her to have as much time as she needs on her paper. Douche. He even rubs her arm in a creepy manner when talking to Jessie.
Jessie does some research into the anti-tech wackos, and eventually falls asleep. In the meantime, Detective Crenshaw finds what looks like the killer's lair. He gets scared by a crusty old farmer instead, who recognizes a piece of evidence shown to him, a chain link. He's not sure where he saw it, though.
Jessie gets comfy, then does more online research. She eventually gets to a website showing gory chain-related crime scenes. She gets nervous and calls Rachel, but her friend is taking a biubble bath, and wearing ear buds for music. Jessie leaves a message, then calls Neil. He's at some internet cafe or bar, but leaves to check on Rachel when Jessie asks him to.
Rachel's power goes out, so she gets out of the tub to see what's going on. After she assumes that Neil caused it, the killer leaps at her, swinging his chain like a club. She dodges and tries to hide in the dark, but the killer slams her against a mirror, then plants the chain in her forehead.
Crenshaw gets a call while investigating Neil's death...there's a profiler named Wiggins who wants to tag along with him. When he asks the remaining kids if Rachel had any enemies, they remember that an older guy had been stalking her online.
Back at his office, Crenshaw meets Wiggins the profiler, who seems like a squirmy bundle of nerves. As they discuss the cult and its leader, Wiggins yells "THEY DON'T LIKE TECHNOLOGY! THEY DON'T LIKE TECHNOLOGY!" Well, saying it twice totally solved the case for me.
Jessie sees something weird on her computer. She walks over to it, and looks closer, only to find that someone appears to have put a tiny camera on it to watch her. You'd think she would have seen that sooner.
Out in a crowd, Jessie gets an email on her phone from the killer. It's just more nonsense about forwarding the chain mail, and how every recipient is another link in the chain. Blah blah blah. In one hilarious sequence, though, she decides that the killer is in the crowd waqtching her. That prompts every weird-looking sleazebag in a 5-mile radius to begin staring at her.
At the end of the day, Neil, Jessie and Michael have a meeting in the park. They discuss how the killer apparently tracked each victim through a virus that was imbedded in the original chain mail. Neil goes crazy with grief, and decides to send the mail directly to both of their phones, which sends Michael into a voilent rage. They have a brief scuffle, until Neil pulls a gun. Tense and angry, the 3 head to their homes.
The killer then sends Neil a new chain letter. And another. And several more. Neil starts hyperventilating, and mutters that the killer should just come get him. A chain then crashes through his bedroom window, and does exactly that.
As Jessie and Michael freak out, Detective Crenshaw gets a call from that creepy farmer, Bradford. He remembered where he saw that style of chain before, on a neighbor's property. It's revealed that the neighbor's son was the tortured soldier mentioned waaaaaay back in the opening credits of the movie, the one whose phone signal got him captured.
Anyway, the chains were sold to a particular meat-packing plant, so Crenshaw decides to go check the place out. His partner tries to call him with a lead, but his phone is turned off. He arrives at the deserted plant, gun drawn, and begins to check it out. He hears yelling, and finds a young man named Kevin wrapped like a mummy in chains. Crenshaw promises to free him, and begins to look for anything nearby that might be useful.
Sadly, the killer arrives, and sets poor Kevin on fire. Crenshaw swiftly finds a place to hide, and calls HQ. He tells the cop on duty to send backup to his location, and patch Wiggins through on the line. The other cop informs him that Wiggins was murdered, and that the man who came to meet Crenshaw was an impostor, likely a member of the anti-technology cult.
After an annoying flashback montage repeating everything from the above paragraph about a dozen times, Crenshaw is captured and knocked out. Jessie is then seen destroying her own phone, after recalling sending the letter to Crenshaw. She then washes up and goes to bed.
During the night, Jessie hears a phone ringing. As she gets up to answer it,another chain flies through another window. Oops, it was a dream sequence. Jessie goes back to sleep. Then you get to more or less watch the opening sequence again, only this time showing Jessie getting captured and chained to both cars first. As her mother watches her get torn apart, the movie winds itself up. THE END.
What an odd movies this one was...a few good genre actors, some pretty memorable kills--but a pretty stupid story, and the dialogue was excruciating. Still, I've seen worse. 6 killer trees out of 10, for being above average yet dumb.
And What did I learn from Chain Letter?
-Well, apparently a select few people own computers that can tell you what kind of email you get, but can't detect a virus in that very same message.
-Facts don't sink in, unless you shout them. Twice.
-Couples who drive to work in different cars are lethal to their children.
Next up on my list is an amusement park slasher, called Dark Ride. Have a great week!
Right off the bat, the movie throws a quote at us..."Life is a chain of dark events." That's strange, because I thought it was like a box of chocolate. Great, another message just popped up: WE ARE ALL CONNECTED...Terrific. Now stop yelling, and start the stupid movie...
Okay, so after several annoying and random-seeming establishing shots, there's a reporter on a TV discussing a killing spree involving several teen victims. A woman is watching the report, but then we go to some anonymous person holding a syringe and pulling on a group of suspended chains. The movie then continues to alternate between the two, , until we see the chain fetish person tying someone to the chains by their ankles and wrists.
The woman is joined by her husband, who has made her some coffee. As the husband gets distracted by the news, the wife asks him to switch it off. Then we return to the person who was chained up, just as they regain consciousness. They can't yell or scream, though...the killer has secured their face with duct tap, leaving only room to breath through their nose, and a rectangle to see through.
The victim begins to panic, and realizes that the chains are attached to 2 cars in the driveway. The cars begin to descend the driveway, and the victim is painfully dragged through the closed garage door. Then both stop for other traffic.
During the pause, the husband decides to turn on his radio and crank up the volume. The wife, from her vehicle, sees the person chained to the cars, and rolls her window down to warn her husband. He doesn't hear her, of course, and takes off...killing the poor victim in the driveway. Then the credits start up.
During the credits, there are several more news reports. The first few are about an anti-technology group trying to infect and disable as many computers as they can, through the usual e-mail viruses and hacking attempts. Then the stories become about a soldier in Iraq who was tracked, captured, then tortured, all because the terrorists who nabbed him were able to find him using his cell phone signal. The final image in the montage implies that the tortured soldier is involved with the anti-technology group.
Then the movie plunges into Saw territory, showing someone held captive in a green room.
Well, apparently that was a scene from the wrong movie, because it ends as abruptly as it began. The NEXT random scene begins with a phone call between 2 teen girls, Jessie and Rachel. Jessie likes a boy they've been friends with since childhood, and Rachel reluctantly agrees to help her try to catch his eye. Is this still Chain Letter, or did I somehow begin watching Sweet Valley High?
At school, we meet Johnny and Mikey. They talk about another friend, Kevin, who was accepted by a college in Nebraska. Then Rachel shows up, and tells them that Adam dumped OH MY GOD WILL YOU JUST START HAVING A PLOT, YOU STUPID MOVIE???? Seriously, this thing's taking years off of my life with all of this inane chatter.
Well, apparently this movie wants me dead, because now we have a guy named Neil, who is Rachel's brother I guess. He yells at her for telling their mother about his masturbation habits, and half the school hears him. Then, as the scene finally comes to an end, a guy named Dan shows up, and gives Rachel a rose. I just don't care anymore. I hope they all die in one big earthquake together. Or I do, before the closing credits roll.
And now we get a dose of greatness, as Brad Dourif shows up in the movie. He plays a quirky(duh) professor, and he's delivering a lecture to the cast about how intrusive technology is in our lives. To prove his point, he taps a small device that emits an EMP, rendering the class textless. Good for him! I wish I had one of those every time I went out to the multiplex. Or, hell, anywhere.
He continues to insist that people are far too willing to give up their privacy to stay connected to each other 24/7, so Jessie raises the point that it makes the world safer to have so much open communication between devices. The teacher argues back that it also makes it easier for people to intrude on our lives, if we share too much of ourselves. Hmmm.....
Neil, our chronic masturbator, is seen playing an MMO by himself. Good to know that he can use more than 1 kind of joystick, I guess. Anyway, he's busy killing someone's online avatar, when a text message blocks his view of the game.
It turns out to be a message from our chain-loving killer, although Neil doesn't know that yet. The message says that he is "the first link in the chain", and then you get the usual nonsense about sending the mail forward to whatever arbitrary number the sender makes up, or else blah blah blah.
Before Neil can even finish reading the message, Rachel enters his bedroom. She insists that she needs access to his computer for a minute, because her phone went screwy or something. When she sees the chain letter, she quickly sends it to her friends, and then Neil adds her name to the list when she exits. So I guess the number was "5", in this case.
Oh, and there was something else that was dumb that I neglected to mention: Neil's computer has this magic ability to tell him if he has "mail" or "chain mail". I think I would keel over in shocked disbelief if I ever came across a Hollywood movie that understood how thing like computers and the Internet actually work.
When she meets up with her friends, Rachel discovers that some have received the chain letter already, and at least one was deleted. She leaves to use the restroom, but ends up out in an alley Quick, escape to a better film while you still can!.
Johnny, the guy who deleted his chain mail, meets up with Kevin at the gym. They discuss their plans for college(kind of "eh"), then Kevin decides to head back home. After Johnny runs on a treadmill, the killer knocks him out from behind.
Johnny wakes up as the killer is piercing his limbs with hooks, then attaching the hooks to chains. While Johnny cries and screams, the killer raises him off the grounds, then drops him again. Then the killer wraps numerous chains around his face, until he gets several disfiguring injuries. After several quick flashes of the killer torturing him, Johnny dies.
The detectives on the case(one of whom is scream queen Betsy Palmer) theorize that the killer must have drugged him when he got up from excercising to grab some water. The killer left no prints, so the cops look through the victim's locker for clues. They don't find anything relevant to the murder, but they discover that our dead jock might have been using steroids.
The funeral takes place in the rain, as movie funerals almost always do. Detective Crenshaw(the one NOT played by Betsy Palmer) shows up after the service to ask some questions. Despite his urgent tone, none of them can think of anyone who wanted Johnny dead.
More rain, and more generic rock music. Dan and a buddy are admiring the progress he's making on a car restoration project. The friend goes to the back to grab somer drinks, and Dan hears a noise from that general location.
When Dan investigates, he can't find his pal, so he returns to his pet project. Sitting behind the wheel, he fantasizes about how much fun the car will be, then he decides to look under the hood.
The engine block is hanging over the car on a chain(!), so Dan begins to fiddle with some bits and pieces. Unexpectedly, the chain loosens, and the engine decapitates Dan. The chain killer strikes again! Boy, that sure was an unexpected development!
More rain, more detective work. The investigators finally figured out that all of the victims were taking the same class, and were friends. If they had a Genius Trophy for sleuthing, this pair would be a shoo-in to get the thing.
Back in class, the teacher gives his students about 10 seconds to mourn. With all that bothersome human emotion out of the way, he then reminds the students that their midterm papers are due Monday. Wow, what a nice guy.
When he dismisses the class, the teacher asks Jessie to stay behind. He probably wants to dock her a letter grade for blinking or breathing too often, but it turns out that he wants her to have as much time as she needs on her paper. Douche. He even rubs her arm in a creepy manner when talking to Jessie.
Jessie does some research into the anti-tech wackos, and eventually falls asleep. In the meantime, Detective Crenshaw finds what looks like the killer's lair. He gets scared by a crusty old farmer instead, who recognizes a piece of evidence shown to him, a chain link. He's not sure where he saw it, though.
Jessie gets comfy, then does more online research. She eventually gets to a website showing gory chain-related crime scenes. She gets nervous and calls Rachel, but her friend is taking a biubble bath, and wearing ear buds for music. Jessie leaves a message, then calls Neil. He's at some internet cafe or bar, but leaves to check on Rachel when Jessie asks him to.
Rachel's power goes out, so she gets out of the tub to see what's going on. After she assumes that Neil caused it, the killer leaps at her, swinging his chain like a club. She dodges and tries to hide in the dark, but the killer slams her against a mirror, then plants the chain in her forehead.
Crenshaw gets a call while investigating Neil's death...there's a profiler named Wiggins who wants to tag along with him. When he asks the remaining kids if Rachel had any enemies, they remember that an older guy had been stalking her online.
Back at his office, Crenshaw meets Wiggins the profiler, who seems like a squirmy bundle of nerves. As they discuss the cult and its leader, Wiggins yells "THEY DON'T LIKE TECHNOLOGY! THEY DON'T LIKE TECHNOLOGY!" Well, saying it twice totally solved the case for me.
Jessie sees something weird on her computer. She walks over to it, and looks closer, only to find that someone appears to have put a tiny camera on it to watch her. You'd think she would have seen that sooner.
Out in a crowd, Jessie gets an email on her phone from the killer. It's just more nonsense about forwarding the chain mail, and how every recipient is another link in the chain. Blah blah blah. In one hilarious sequence, though, she decides that the killer is in the crowd waqtching her. That prompts every weird-looking sleazebag in a 5-mile radius to begin staring at her.
At the end of the day, Neil, Jessie and Michael have a meeting in the park. They discuss how the killer apparently tracked each victim through a virus that was imbedded in the original chain mail. Neil goes crazy with grief, and decides to send the mail directly to both of their phones, which sends Michael into a voilent rage. They have a brief scuffle, until Neil pulls a gun. Tense and angry, the 3 head to their homes.
The killer then sends Neil a new chain letter. And another. And several more. Neil starts hyperventilating, and mutters that the killer should just come get him. A chain then crashes through his bedroom window, and does exactly that.
As Jessie and Michael freak out, Detective Crenshaw gets a call from that creepy farmer, Bradford. He remembered where he saw that style of chain before, on a neighbor's property. It's revealed that the neighbor's son was the tortured soldier mentioned waaaaaay back in the opening credits of the movie, the one whose phone signal got him captured.
Anyway, the chains were sold to a particular meat-packing plant, so Crenshaw decides to go check the place out. His partner tries to call him with a lead, but his phone is turned off. He arrives at the deserted plant, gun drawn, and begins to check it out. He hears yelling, and finds a young man named Kevin wrapped like a mummy in chains. Crenshaw promises to free him, and begins to look for anything nearby that might be useful.
Sadly, the killer arrives, and sets poor Kevin on fire. Crenshaw swiftly finds a place to hide, and calls HQ. He tells the cop on duty to send backup to his location, and patch Wiggins through on the line. The other cop informs him that Wiggins was murdered, and that the man who came to meet Crenshaw was an impostor, likely a member of the anti-technology cult.
After an annoying flashback montage repeating everything from the above paragraph about a dozen times, Crenshaw is captured and knocked out. Jessie is then seen destroying her own phone, after recalling sending the letter to Crenshaw. She then washes up and goes to bed.
During the night, Jessie hears a phone ringing. As she gets up to answer it,another chain flies through another window. Oops, it was a dream sequence. Jessie goes back to sleep. Then you get to more or less watch the opening sequence again, only this time showing Jessie getting captured and chained to both cars first. As her mother watches her get torn apart, the movie winds itself up. THE END.
What an odd movies this one was...a few good genre actors, some pretty memorable kills--but a pretty stupid story, and the dialogue was excruciating. Still, I've seen worse. 6 killer trees out of 10, for being above average yet dumb.
And What did I learn from Chain Letter?
-Well, apparently a select few people own computers that can tell you what kind of email you get, but can't detect a virus in that very same message.
-Facts don't sink in, unless you shout them. Twice.
-Couples who drive to work in different cars are lethal to their children.
Next up on my list is an amusement park slasher, called Dark Ride. Have a great week!
Sunday, May 27, 2012
Wishcraft
This week's entry is rare, in that I have no prior experience with it at all. Don't know anyone who's seen it, have never seen a trailer or scene from it, nada. I'm still on the fence if that's a good or a bad sign. Ayway, it's called Wishcraft, so put on your SPOILER-glasses, and let's wish for a good slasher flick this week!
The opening scene shows somebody typing a letter. While he's typing, the credits reveal that the cast includes the late Zelda Rubinstein(the medium from the Poltergeist movies), Meatloaf(using his real name...usually a bad sign), and Charlie Talbert(ANGUS!...neat!). After our secretary is done with her letter, the movie settles into an average high school in Averageville.
There, we meet our 2 main characters, Brett Bumpers and Samantha Warren. Brett is trying to tutor Samantha in World History, but it's her oral performance on a pen that has him pretty flustered. She sees his reaction, and further distracts him by asking Brett what his interests are. He mumbles that he like reading and food and movies and girls and, golly, all sortsa neat stuff! She laughs and tells him that she just won a bet--her boyfriend, Cody, thought Brett was gay. Thern she skips merrily away, tra la la la la...
On his way home from school, Brett stops to watch Sam and the other cheerleaders practice. One of the other girls even teases her, saying that Brett has a crush on her. As Brett leaves, the squad does a cheer devoted to Cody. Ow, dude.
At the dinner table, Brett's father tells him that he wants them to work at the office together over the summer. Yeah, that sounds like a fun summer! Then his mother humiliates him by asking if he has a date to the Spring Formal. Wait, wasn't one of my early blogs also about a movie where they kept calling the prom a "Spring Formal"? Weird, it's like a sub-genre, or something.
So, the next day, we get to sit in on Brett and Sam's history class. The teacher, Mr. Turner, is talking about Hitler and WWII, when an attractive student named Desiree arrives late. Mr. Turner puts her on the spot with some impromptu questions about Hitler, then gets pissed off when he sees Cody and Sam flirting. He decides to make an example of Cody, who tries to get his buddy Jimbo(Angus!!!) to answer the question for him.
When that fails, Mr. Turner makes Sam his next target. Brett turns and tries to whisper the answer to her, but Mr. Turner hears him. He lets Brett answer the question, which effectively enlarges the target that the jocks already have on him and his kind.
After school, Brett goes online to chat with a friend about his feelings for Sam. The friend reminds him that Cody would kick his ass if he ever made a move on Samantha. Then he just cracks wise until Brett is cheered up again.
Later, while sitting under a tree, Brett and his stoner friend Howie(maybe the same guy from the previous scene, maybe not....so far, I'm lapsing into a boredom-coma) watch the jocks have a near-fight with some lether jacket-types. Nothing happens. That should be the title of this thing.
When Brett gets home, he finds a mysterious package has arrived for him. He opens it in his room, revealing a letter and an ornately decorated box. The letter claims that the box contains a "totem", capable of granting him 3 wishes. Inside the box is something that looks like a body part, and Brett quickly shuts the lid in disgust.
At lunch the next day, he tells Howie about the package. Howie scolds him about throwing it away, then steals the key to Brett's moped. They find the totem still in the trash, and Howie encourages Brett to make a wish...a practice wish, if you will.
Brett wishes for Samantha to go to the dance with him. DUH. Throw in a pointless cameo by Vincent Price, and this is an episode of The Brady Bunch. Gosh, I really can't imagine what'll happen next! I hope he finds a tiki mask and masks 17 more wishes!
The very next day, Sam asks Brett to the dance. Wow. After he agrees, Sam leaves to tell Cody that she plans to go to the dance with Brett instead of him. Meanwhile, Brett brings the "totem" to an animal expert, who tells him that it's a bull penis. Oh, and it's very, very old. And the bull is probably pretty upset.
When Brett arrives to bring Sam to the dance, her parents give him the cold shoulder. She apologizes on the way to the car, prompting Brett to ask her why she asked him to be her date. Sam gets flustered, and admits that she doesn't really know.
At the dance, Cody and Angus(JIMBO!!!!...Shit, I did it backwards!) watch while Sam dances with an uncomfortable-looking Brett. Then Cody is left behind as even his friend gets to dance. Ha! Take that, popular guy!
Brett does much better on a slow dance, but the night ends as awkwardly as it began. When they get to her house, Samantha tells Brett that she thinks that they should just go back to the way things were, when they return to school. Brett looks like a kitten shot by a cannonball, but he agrees.
Jimbo goes out with a girl after the dance, and both are smashed. They nearly hit another vehicle, then safely drive to an open field, where they both relax on the grass. Some automated sprinklers ruin it for them, though, and they trudge back to the car. Jimbo can't find his keys, so he leaves his date by the car, while he goes back under the sprinklers.
They turn off when he arrives, and he starts to think a prank is being played on him. Jimbo then encounters a stranger wearing a hooded outfit, and proceeds to get thrown around like a rag doll(down to see her cutie), then hacked up. His date, who exits the car to look for him, discovers his severed head on a pole.
After the field is closed off as a crime scene, they call in Meatloaf to solve the murder. (this is the point where I whip off a pair of sunglasses, declare it a "ham-icide", and The Who kick in with a scream...) Instead, he defers to the medical examiner(Poltergeist chick), and she says that the cuts were done with surgical precision, except the decapitation, which was rougher. She suggests that multiple weapons were used, and that the killer possessed immense strength. Oh, and Jimbo was still alive by the time he was decapitated.
At a school assembly, I learn that the "field" was a golf course. Okey doke. The principal introduces Meatloaf as "Detective Sparky"(Iwish I were kidding), and he gets up to speak to the kids about the case. He announces that he and his team are going to begin by interviewing the students that very day.
Ater school, Brett and Sam talk about Jimbo's murder. That somehow leads into a discussion about their plans after high school, and they discover that they both want to travel a little before going right into college. Gosh, it's like they're destined to be together!
During one of the student interviews, Sparky questions Eddie, who looks like what you'd get if you combined Kurt Russell with Silly Putty. Eddie is asked about the brief incident he had with the jocks several scenes ago, but he plays it cool. Even when he's asked if he owns a knife, it doesn't get much of a reaction. They eventually let him leave.
Howie goes to the principal's office, mostly because he wants to speak to the attractive female grief counselor. The principal sees right through his act, and offers to hug his grief out right there. Then he sends Howie away with a huge eye-roll.
That night, Brett makes his second wish. He wants Sam to love and be with him forever, but not in a way that seems forced. Geez, why not just ask for the ability to fly and have heat vision, while you're at it? Any way she ends up with you, Brett, is going to be forced and unnatural. Truth hurts.
By the way, have I mentioned that the cleft in Brett's chin is so deep, it looks like he has a pair of butt cheeks under his face? No? Well, I have now. Now, just try watching the rest of Wishcraft without being distracted by his ass-chin....Ha!
Anyway, now that I've tormented y'all...So, Brett makes his second wish, which seems as silly and frivolous as the first one. I mean, he could literally wish for ANYTHING, and his first 2 wishes are for things he could maybe do for himself. Ask for great wealth. Immortality. Heck do what Jonathan did on Buffy, and ask to be the most important person in the world. Think big!
During school, Sam drops by Brett's home. She gets all googly-eyed when talking to him, and he invites her inside. She tells Brett that she woke up thinking about him, and she can't think about anyone else. Even though he's the one who wished for this, Brett looks creeped-out by all the attention.
Her new feelings don't sit well with Cody. As soon as she dumps him, she calls Brett to ask him for a date. Sam invites him to come over that weekend, on a night when her parents will be out. Brett looks like he might faint, but agrees to the date.
At Sam's house, she gives Brett a lap dance. It ends with a kiss, as well as some heavy petting. Boy, this guy's wishes move fast! It's like a fanfic written by a 14-year-old at this point.
In the school cafeteria, Brett refuses to give Howie any details about his "date" with Sam. He does, however, flirt with her from across the room, which drives Howie crazy. So Brett is okay with forcing someone to have feelings for him, but too much of a gentleman to brag about his conquests? Yeah, this is definitely some kid's fan-fiction made into a movie, for sure.
In Mr. Turner's empty class, Brett asks the teacher about the significance of magic in different cultures. Turner presses him for info about this sudden interest, and Brett makes up some bull about his younger sibling getting a magic wand. The teacher just sort of smiles at him. Foreshadowing?
Brett and Howie then debate over the power of the totem, and Howie asks Brett to hook him up with Sam instead. Man, he really is stoned, if he thinks that Brett would go along with such a stupid plan. Of course, given how stupid the first 2 wishes were, Howie might be wise beyond his years. Oh, then Sam calls Brett, so Howie leaves.
While Brett parties with the popular kids, Howie gains access to the totem. He takes it to the party, then sits in his car and tries to figure out what to do with the thing. While getting high, of course. Howie wishes that he could be an action hero, then gets his ass kicked when he goes to a biker bar.
Later that night, Howie is in bed and hurting from the beating that he took. He staggers to the bathroom, then heads back to his room, where he sees that one of his windows is now open. As Howie starts to close it, a figure attacks him with a knife, and throws him to the floor. Lucky for him, it's just Brett, and the knife is a fake...
Brett demands the totem, and asks him if he wasted the last wish. Boy, talk about irony! Howie tells him that the wishes don't work for anyone else, and the 2 friends call a truce. Wow, that was resolved fast! It's like what a slasher movie would look like if made by Nickelodeon.
There's a fight between Eddie and Cody the next day, until the school staff pull them off of each other. After the incident, Cody decides to shower off, and the killer shows up to turn out the lights in the locker room. Cody looks for the culprit, and gets slammed in the head by a locker door, which knocks him out cold.
He wakes up on the golf course, and discovers that he has been placed in a hole feet-first, with only his head exposed. As Cody screams for help, the hooded killer approaches him with a bowling bag. The killer backs away in the fog, then Cody sees a red bowling ball rolling swiftly in his direction.
Cody manages to turn his head enough to miss making contact with the ball. He seems pretty happy, until he notices a second ball aimed straight at his face. We don't see the hit, but the crime scene team shows up the next morning to collect evidence from the aftermath. Sparky gets a good look at the damage, but we don't. Lame.
Sparky pays another visit to the M.E., and she tells him that she thinks that all of the victims were done in by the same person. Sparky reminds her that the first victim was killed with a sword, while Cody was bashed with a bowling ball, but she sticks to her guns. Hey, she is a medium, after all...Who better to ask?
Eddie is arrested as the prime suspect. At a press conference, Sparky reveals that Eddie had recent trouble with both victims, and that's their best idea regarding the motive. Oh Sparky, Sparky, Sparky...Eddie would do anything for love, but he wouldn't do that! You should sleep on it, baby, baby.
While on a dinner date, Brett asks Samantha what made her really break up with Cody. She tells him that Cody always mistreated her, and she finally grew tired of his attitude. When she gets up to use the restroom, Desiree(the girl from the dance many, many scenes ago) tells Brett that she alwaqys thought he was a cool person, until he started dating Sam.
Feeling guilty, Brett nearly tells Sam what he did to her with his wishes, but she convinces him that her feelings for him are genuine. She even goes so far as to suggest that she's actually the one taking advantage of him. Man, every guy should lead just a ridiculously charmed life!
After the restaurant closes for the night, Desiree walks home on the most deserted street ever. Some noises lead her to believe that someone is following her, and it rattles her confidence. She grabs some mace from her purse, and decides to start running home. She then hears another sound behind her. Desiree whips around to spray her stalker, but she's alone.
Just as she relaxes, a noose drops down and wraps around her throat, and Desiree is hoisted into the air on a traffic light pole. The killer wraps the end of the rope/wire to a heavy post, and then he watches Desiree until she stops struggling.
As he walks away, we see that Desiree was playing dead. She quickly grabs the cord, and pulls herself up toward the top of the traffic light, to get enough slack to remove the noose. Sadly, the killer hears her. He walks back to the light, grabs her foot, and yanks her down hard enough to snap her neck. Awww, why'd you have to kill her???
The mayor calls Sparky into his office the following day, and officially removes him from the investigation. He tells the detective that the case will now be handed over to the FBI, and that Eddie is no longer being held as a suspect. The mayor relents, though, and gives Sparky 1 week to solve the case. If he doesn't catch the killer in 7 days, he'll be fired. He sure is wishy-washy.
Sparky's partner then gets a message, that someone has actually confessed to all of the murders. Sparky questions the new suspect, a stringy-haired loon named Eugene. Eugene describes each crime scene in somewhat vague terms, and Sparky clearly has doubts about him. When asked if he's strong enough to do many of the things the killer did, Eugene responds by throwing one of the cops across the room.
At school, Brett is distracted by the feeling that other students are staring at him and Samantha. He tells Howie that he's decided to confess to her about the wishes he made. Howie suggests that he take her to a romantic location, then break the news to her. He mentions that his folks have a summer house, and Brett thanks Howie for letting him use the location. Unfortunately, a jock in the bathroom hears the plan, and he and his buddies decide to ambush the couple at the summer home.
The cops drag a local lake to search for evidence, and find the red bowling ball. They then make the new suspect match his fingers to the ball, but the holes are too small. Sparky gets so mad about being lied to, that he bonks the guy in the forehead with ball. The investigation continues.
At Howie's summer house, Brett remains true to his word. He tells Sam about the package, the totem inside, and the wishes. As she begins to realize that Brett may have been forcing himself into her life, she gets pretty upset and heads upstairs.
She locks herself into a bedroom, and ignores Brett when he begs her to talk to him. Outside, the 3 jocks arrive, and immediatly split up to check door and windows around the house. The third guy is left by himself, so he just sort of wanders around in the trees.
Howie calls Brett to see how the talk went, but the answering machine gets the message before Brett can, and Howie hangs up before they can talk. Then we see the killer cut the power to the house, and everything goes dark. Jinkies, Scoob!
The fat kid who was abandoned by his buddies gets nervous. He bends down to get something that he dropped, and the killer looms up behind him. Before the kid can stand up, he gets an axe in his back. I hate when that happens. That's why, when I drop something, it stays dropped.
Another jock finds his body, and the killer chases the second kid around. The teen gets into a car, but the killer smashes the windows to get to him. and kills him while he's trapped. Then Sam's ex finds Brett, and kicks his ass. Brett gets away, and tries to find Sam, to keep her safe, but she seems to have vanished. Wait, he can't be Sam's ex, because we saw Cody get bowled to death! Who the heck is this guy, then?
Then the killer breaks in, and stalks not-Cody, while Brett finds Sam hiding in the attic. They hear not-Cody let out a blood-curdling shout from the kitchen, and both sneak up to the attic to hide. The killer heads right to their location, where he takes some random stabs at them from the ceiling below.
When that has zero effect, the killer talks directly to Brett. Oh, and his voice is distorted to hide his identity. He tells the teen to come down and face him, or the killer will murder them both. Not wanting Sam to get hurt, Brett emerges from the attic.
The hallway looks empty, so Brett goes to the first floor. He finds the hooded figure standing in front of the fireplace, and they finally face each other. The killer removes his hood and scary mask, revealing himself to be...Mr. Turner?
Yup. He bought the totem for 10 bucks during a vacation, and used his first wish to kill his wife. His second wish was for money, and he now has a Swiss bank account with $10 million waiting for him. His final wish, for superhuman strength, was used to kill the students who slacked off in his classes.
Turner reveals that Sam is the last name on his list, and Brett tries to stop him. Since Turner has that strength, it proves impossible to hurt him, and Turner deflects the attack easily before going back up the stairs. Sam has no idea what's coming, so Turner has the upper hand.
When Turner pops his head through the opening, Sam knocks him back to the second floor by bashing him in the face. He passes out, but wakes up as she tries to escape. He abducts Sam, and ties her to a wall, where he throws knives, hatchets, and other implements all around her.
Brett snatches one of the flying weapons before it reaches Sam, and he reveals that his third wish was to be faster and stronger than Mr. Turner. As he explains it to Sam, the teacher escapes unseen. Not too observant, dumbasses.
Brett goes outside to find the killer, and his teacher tries to run him over. Then Turner disappears yet again, and pops up behind Brett to try and strangle him. Sam makes him release Brett by jumping on Turner's back and pummeling him with her amazing girl-hands that have no supernatural power whatsoever.. He merely pushes her away.
Then the 2 magically-strong men have a battle. Mr. Turner has his samurai sword, while Brett is holding a bulky statue, a stupid garden gnome. He deflects the blade several times, then slams the teacher in the face with the gnome, hard enough to knock Turner down.
Brett picks up the samurai sword, and tells Turner that shouldn't have murdered all those people. But before he can finish the teacher off, Turner springs at him yet again. While Turner has him pinned on the grass, Brett brings the sword down on the back of the killer's neck, sort of half-beheading him.
During the aftermath of the police investigation, Brett again tries to make amends to Sam for using and manipulating her. As they try to figure out how to fix everything between them, Sam suggests that Brett could give her the totem next, and let her decide how to make things right again. Oh, and the town holds a ceremony declaring that Brett is a hero. Hip hip, who cares?
As Sam and Brett talk about how good it feels for Sam to be making her own choices again, Brett asks her if she has made any wishes yet. She reveals that she has, indeed, used her first wish. As they discuss their plans for the summer, Sam also lets Brett know that she's taking his advice, and traveling around Europe. Her first destination is Greece.
As they walk back to their parents, Brett gets a graduation gift that shocks him: a tour of Europe, starting with Greece. As Brett realizes that it was Sam's wish, they grin at each other, then embrace. THE END
Well, despite the lack of gore, and the surplus of goofy humor, this one was fairly watchable. At least the body count was high. If the effects budget had been bigger(or indeed, had there been ANY effects budget), this would have kicked some ass with all of the zany murder methods. Oh well, maybe a sequel or remake someday....in the meantime, I give Wishcraft 3.5 killer trees out of 5.
And what did I get from watching Wishcraft?
-Well, wishes can get pretty bland.
Butt-chins turn girls on?
-ANGUS!!!!!!!!!!!!!(sorry, but that was a good movie...)
Next on my list is something called Chain Letter. Pass it on....and have a good week!
The opening scene shows somebody typing a letter. While he's typing, the credits reveal that the cast includes the late Zelda Rubinstein(the medium from the Poltergeist movies), Meatloaf(using his real name...usually a bad sign), and Charlie Talbert(ANGUS!...neat!). After our secretary is done with her letter, the movie settles into an average high school in Averageville.
There, we meet our 2 main characters, Brett Bumpers and Samantha Warren. Brett is trying to tutor Samantha in World History, but it's her oral performance on a pen that has him pretty flustered. She sees his reaction, and further distracts him by asking Brett what his interests are. He mumbles that he like reading and food and movies and girls and, golly, all sortsa neat stuff! She laughs and tells him that she just won a bet--her boyfriend, Cody, thought Brett was gay. Thern she skips merrily away, tra la la la la...
On his way home from school, Brett stops to watch Sam and the other cheerleaders practice. One of the other girls even teases her, saying that Brett has a crush on her. As Brett leaves, the squad does a cheer devoted to Cody. Ow, dude.
At the dinner table, Brett's father tells him that he wants them to work at the office together over the summer. Yeah, that sounds like a fun summer! Then his mother humiliates him by asking if he has a date to the Spring Formal. Wait, wasn't one of my early blogs also about a movie where they kept calling the prom a "Spring Formal"? Weird, it's like a sub-genre, or something.
So, the next day, we get to sit in on Brett and Sam's history class. The teacher, Mr. Turner, is talking about Hitler and WWII, when an attractive student named Desiree arrives late. Mr. Turner puts her on the spot with some impromptu questions about Hitler, then gets pissed off when he sees Cody and Sam flirting. He decides to make an example of Cody, who tries to get his buddy Jimbo(Angus!!!) to answer the question for him.
When that fails, Mr. Turner makes Sam his next target. Brett turns and tries to whisper the answer to her, but Mr. Turner hears him. He lets Brett answer the question, which effectively enlarges the target that the jocks already have on him and his kind.
After school, Brett goes online to chat with a friend about his feelings for Sam. The friend reminds him that Cody would kick his ass if he ever made a move on Samantha. Then he just cracks wise until Brett is cheered up again.
Later, while sitting under a tree, Brett and his stoner friend Howie(maybe the same guy from the previous scene, maybe not....so far, I'm lapsing into a boredom-coma) watch the jocks have a near-fight with some lether jacket-types. Nothing happens. That should be the title of this thing.
When Brett gets home, he finds a mysterious package has arrived for him. He opens it in his room, revealing a letter and an ornately decorated box. The letter claims that the box contains a "totem", capable of granting him 3 wishes. Inside the box is something that looks like a body part, and Brett quickly shuts the lid in disgust.
At lunch the next day, he tells Howie about the package. Howie scolds him about throwing it away, then steals the key to Brett's moped. They find the totem still in the trash, and Howie encourages Brett to make a wish...a practice wish, if you will.
Brett wishes for Samantha to go to the dance with him. DUH. Throw in a pointless cameo by Vincent Price, and this is an episode of The Brady Bunch. Gosh, I really can't imagine what'll happen next! I hope he finds a tiki mask and masks 17 more wishes!
The very next day, Sam asks Brett to the dance. Wow. After he agrees, Sam leaves to tell Cody that she plans to go to the dance with Brett instead of him. Meanwhile, Brett brings the "totem" to an animal expert, who tells him that it's a bull penis. Oh, and it's very, very old. And the bull is probably pretty upset.
When Brett arrives to bring Sam to the dance, her parents give him the cold shoulder. She apologizes on the way to the car, prompting Brett to ask her why she asked him to be her date. Sam gets flustered, and admits that she doesn't really know.
At the dance, Cody and Angus(JIMBO!!!!...Shit, I did it backwards!) watch while Sam dances with an uncomfortable-looking Brett. Then Cody is left behind as even his friend gets to dance. Ha! Take that, popular guy!
Brett does much better on a slow dance, but the night ends as awkwardly as it began. When they get to her house, Samantha tells Brett that she thinks that they should just go back to the way things were, when they return to school. Brett looks like a kitten shot by a cannonball, but he agrees.
Jimbo goes out with a girl after the dance, and both are smashed. They nearly hit another vehicle, then safely drive to an open field, where they both relax on the grass. Some automated sprinklers ruin it for them, though, and they trudge back to the car. Jimbo can't find his keys, so he leaves his date by the car, while he goes back under the sprinklers.
They turn off when he arrives, and he starts to think a prank is being played on him. Jimbo then encounters a stranger wearing a hooded outfit, and proceeds to get thrown around like a rag doll(down to see her cutie), then hacked up. His date, who exits the car to look for him, discovers his severed head on a pole.
After the field is closed off as a crime scene, they call in Meatloaf to solve the murder. (this is the point where I whip off a pair of sunglasses, declare it a "ham-icide", and The Who kick in with a scream...) Instead, he defers to the medical examiner(Poltergeist chick), and she says that the cuts were done with surgical precision, except the decapitation, which was rougher. She suggests that multiple weapons were used, and that the killer possessed immense strength. Oh, and Jimbo was still alive by the time he was decapitated.
At a school assembly, I learn that the "field" was a golf course. Okey doke. The principal introduces Meatloaf as "Detective Sparky"(Iwish I were kidding), and he gets up to speak to the kids about the case. He announces that he and his team are going to begin by interviewing the students that very day.
Ater school, Brett and Sam talk about Jimbo's murder. That somehow leads into a discussion about their plans after high school, and they discover that they both want to travel a little before going right into college. Gosh, it's like they're destined to be together!
During one of the student interviews, Sparky questions Eddie, who looks like what you'd get if you combined Kurt Russell with Silly Putty. Eddie is asked about the brief incident he had with the jocks several scenes ago, but he plays it cool. Even when he's asked if he owns a knife, it doesn't get much of a reaction. They eventually let him leave.
Howie goes to the principal's office, mostly because he wants to speak to the attractive female grief counselor. The principal sees right through his act, and offers to hug his grief out right there. Then he sends Howie away with a huge eye-roll.
That night, Brett makes his second wish. He wants Sam to love and be with him forever, but not in a way that seems forced. Geez, why not just ask for the ability to fly and have heat vision, while you're at it? Any way she ends up with you, Brett, is going to be forced and unnatural. Truth hurts.
By the way, have I mentioned that the cleft in Brett's chin is so deep, it looks like he has a pair of butt cheeks under his face? No? Well, I have now. Now, just try watching the rest of Wishcraft without being distracted by his ass-chin....Ha!
Anyway, now that I've tormented y'all...So, Brett makes his second wish, which seems as silly and frivolous as the first one. I mean, he could literally wish for ANYTHING, and his first 2 wishes are for things he could maybe do for himself. Ask for great wealth. Immortality. Heck do what Jonathan did on Buffy, and ask to be the most important person in the world. Think big!
During school, Sam drops by Brett's home. She gets all googly-eyed when talking to him, and he invites her inside. She tells Brett that she woke up thinking about him, and she can't think about anyone else. Even though he's the one who wished for this, Brett looks creeped-out by all the attention.
Her new feelings don't sit well with Cody. As soon as she dumps him, she calls Brett to ask him for a date. Sam invites him to come over that weekend, on a night when her parents will be out. Brett looks like he might faint, but agrees to the date.
At Sam's house, she gives Brett a lap dance. It ends with a kiss, as well as some heavy petting. Boy, this guy's wishes move fast! It's like a fanfic written by a 14-year-old at this point.
In the school cafeteria, Brett refuses to give Howie any details about his "date" with Sam. He does, however, flirt with her from across the room, which drives Howie crazy. So Brett is okay with forcing someone to have feelings for him, but too much of a gentleman to brag about his conquests? Yeah, this is definitely some kid's fan-fiction made into a movie, for sure.
In Mr. Turner's empty class, Brett asks the teacher about the significance of magic in different cultures. Turner presses him for info about this sudden interest, and Brett makes up some bull about his younger sibling getting a magic wand. The teacher just sort of smiles at him. Foreshadowing?
Brett and Howie then debate over the power of the totem, and Howie asks Brett to hook him up with Sam instead. Man, he really is stoned, if he thinks that Brett would go along with such a stupid plan. Of course, given how stupid the first 2 wishes were, Howie might be wise beyond his years. Oh, then Sam calls Brett, so Howie leaves.
While Brett parties with the popular kids, Howie gains access to the totem. He takes it to the party, then sits in his car and tries to figure out what to do with the thing. While getting high, of course. Howie wishes that he could be an action hero, then gets his ass kicked when he goes to a biker bar.
Later that night, Howie is in bed and hurting from the beating that he took. He staggers to the bathroom, then heads back to his room, where he sees that one of his windows is now open. As Howie starts to close it, a figure attacks him with a knife, and throws him to the floor. Lucky for him, it's just Brett, and the knife is a fake...
Brett demands the totem, and asks him if he wasted the last wish. Boy, talk about irony! Howie tells him that the wishes don't work for anyone else, and the 2 friends call a truce. Wow, that was resolved fast! It's like what a slasher movie would look like if made by Nickelodeon.
There's a fight between Eddie and Cody the next day, until the school staff pull them off of each other. After the incident, Cody decides to shower off, and the killer shows up to turn out the lights in the locker room. Cody looks for the culprit, and gets slammed in the head by a locker door, which knocks him out cold.
He wakes up on the golf course, and discovers that he has been placed in a hole feet-first, with only his head exposed. As Cody screams for help, the hooded killer approaches him with a bowling bag. The killer backs away in the fog, then Cody sees a red bowling ball rolling swiftly in his direction.
Cody manages to turn his head enough to miss making contact with the ball. He seems pretty happy, until he notices a second ball aimed straight at his face. We don't see the hit, but the crime scene team shows up the next morning to collect evidence from the aftermath. Sparky gets a good look at the damage, but we don't. Lame.
Sparky pays another visit to the M.E., and she tells him that she thinks that all of the victims were done in by the same person. Sparky reminds her that the first victim was killed with a sword, while Cody was bashed with a bowling ball, but she sticks to her guns. Hey, she is a medium, after all...Who better to ask?
Eddie is arrested as the prime suspect. At a press conference, Sparky reveals that Eddie had recent trouble with both victims, and that's their best idea regarding the motive. Oh Sparky, Sparky, Sparky...Eddie would do anything for love, but he wouldn't do that! You should sleep on it, baby, baby.
While on a dinner date, Brett asks Samantha what made her really break up with Cody. She tells him that Cody always mistreated her, and she finally grew tired of his attitude. When she gets up to use the restroom, Desiree(the girl from the dance many, many scenes ago) tells Brett that she alwaqys thought he was a cool person, until he started dating Sam.
Feeling guilty, Brett nearly tells Sam what he did to her with his wishes, but she convinces him that her feelings for him are genuine. She even goes so far as to suggest that she's actually the one taking advantage of him. Man, every guy should lead just a ridiculously charmed life!
After the restaurant closes for the night, Desiree walks home on the most deserted street ever. Some noises lead her to believe that someone is following her, and it rattles her confidence. She grabs some mace from her purse, and decides to start running home. She then hears another sound behind her. Desiree whips around to spray her stalker, but she's alone.
Just as she relaxes, a noose drops down and wraps around her throat, and Desiree is hoisted into the air on a traffic light pole. The killer wraps the end of the rope/wire to a heavy post, and then he watches Desiree until she stops struggling.
As he walks away, we see that Desiree was playing dead. She quickly grabs the cord, and pulls herself up toward the top of the traffic light, to get enough slack to remove the noose. Sadly, the killer hears her. He walks back to the light, grabs her foot, and yanks her down hard enough to snap her neck. Awww, why'd you have to kill her???
The mayor calls Sparky into his office the following day, and officially removes him from the investigation. He tells the detective that the case will now be handed over to the FBI, and that Eddie is no longer being held as a suspect. The mayor relents, though, and gives Sparky 1 week to solve the case. If he doesn't catch the killer in 7 days, he'll be fired. He sure is wishy-washy.
Sparky's partner then gets a message, that someone has actually confessed to all of the murders. Sparky questions the new suspect, a stringy-haired loon named Eugene. Eugene describes each crime scene in somewhat vague terms, and Sparky clearly has doubts about him. When asked if he's strong enough to do many of the things the killer did, Eugene responds by throwing one of the cops across the room.
At school, Brett is distracted by the feeling that other students are staring at him and Samantha. He tells Howie that he's decided to confess to her about the wishes he made. Howie suggests that he take her to a romantic location, then break the news to her. He mentions that his folks have a summer house, and Brett thanks Howie for letting him use the location. Unfortunately, a jock in the bathroom hears the plan, and he and his buddies decide to ambush the couple at the summer home.
The cops drag a local lake to search for evidence, and find the red bowling ball. They then make the new suspect match his fingers to the ball, but the holes are too small. Sparky gets so mad about being lied to, that he bonks the guy in the forehead with ball. The investigation continues.
At Howie's summer house, Brett remains true to his word. He tells Sam about the package, the totem inside, and the wishes. As she begins to realize that Brett may have been forcing himself into her life, she gets pretty upset and heads upstairs.
She locks herself into a bedroom, and ignores Brett when he begs her to talk to him. Outside, the 3 jocks arrive, and immediatly split up to check door and windows around the house. The third guy is left by himself, so he just sort of wanders around in the trees.
Howie calls Brett to see how the talk went, but the answering machine gets the message before Brett can, and Howie hangs up before they can talk. Then we see the killer cut the power to the house, and everything goes dark. Jinkies, Scoob!
The fat kid who was abandoned by his buddies gets nervous. He bends down to get something that he dropped, and the killer looms up behind him. Before the kid can stand up, he gets an axe in his back. I hate when that happens. That's why, when I drop something, it stays dropped.
Another jock finds his body, and the killer chases the second kid around. The teen gets into a car, but the killer smashes the windows to get to him. and kills him while he's trapped. Then Sam's ex finds Brett, and kicks his ass. Brett gets away, and tries to find Sam, to keep her safe, but she seems to have vanished. Wait, he can't be Sam's ex, because we saw Cody get bowled to death! Who the heck is this guy, then?
Then the killer breaks in, and stalks not-Cody, while Brett finds Sam hiding in the attic. They hear not-Cody let out a blood-curdling shout from the kitchen, and both sneak up to the attic to hide. The killer heads right to their location, where he takes some random stabs at them from the ceiling below.
When that has zero effect, the killer talks directly to Brett. Oh, and his voice is distorted to hide his identity. He tells the teen to come down and face him, or the killer will murder them both. Not wanting Sam to get hurt, Brett emerges from the attic.
The hallway looks empty, so Brett goes to the first floor. He finds the hooded figure standing in front of the fireplace, and they finally face each other. The killer removes his hood and scary mask, revealing himself to be...Mr. Turner?
Yup. He bought the totem for 10 bucks during a vacation, and used his first wish to kill his wife. His second wish was for money, and he now has a Swiss bank account with $10 million waiting for him. His final wish, for superhuman strength, was used to kill the students who slacked off in his classes.
Turner reveals that Sam is the last name on his list, and Brett tries to stop him. Since Turner has that strength, it proves impossible to hurt him, and Turner deflects the attack easily before going back up the stairs. Sam has no idea what's coming, so Turner has the upper hand.
When Turner pops his head through the opening, Sam knocks him back to the second floor by bashing him in the face. He passes out, but wakes up as she tries to escape. He abducts Sam, and ties her to a wall, where he throws knives, hatchets, and other implements all around her.
Brett snatches one of the flying weapons before it reaches Sam, and he reveals that his third wish was to be faster and stronger than Mr. Turner. As he explains it to Sam, the teacher escapes unseen. Not too observant, dumbasses.
Brett goes outside to find the killer, and his teacher tries to run him over. Then Turner disappears yet again, and pops up behind Brett to try and strangle him. Sam makes him release Brett by jumping on Turner's back and pummeling him with her amazing girl-hands that have no supernatural power whatsoever.. He merely pushes her away.
Then the 2 magically-strong men have a battle. Mr. Turner has his samurai sword, while Brett is holding a bulky statue, a stupid garden gnome. He deflects the blade several times, then slams the teacher in the face with the gnome, hard enough to knock Turner down.
Brett picks up the samurai sword, and tells Turner that shouldn't have murdered all those people. But before he can finish the teacher off, Turner springs at him yet again. While Turner has him pinned on the grass, Brett brings the sword down on the back of the killer's neck, sort of half-beheading him.
During the aftermath of the police investigation, Brett again tries to make amends to Sam for using and manipulating her. As they try to figure out how to fix everything between them, Sam suggests that Brett could give her the totem next, and let her decide how to make things right again. Oh, and the town holds a ceremony declaring that Brett is a hero. Hip hip, who cares?
As Sam and Brett talk about how good it feels for Sam to be making her own choices again, Brett asks her if she has made any wishes yet. She reveals that she has, indeed, used her first wish. As they discuss their plans for the summer, Sam also lets Brett know that she's taking his advice, and traveling around Europe. Her first destination is Greece.
As they walk back to their parents, Brett gets a graduation gift that shocks him: a tour of Europe, starting with Greece. As Brett realizes that it was Sam's wish, they grin at each other, then embrace. THE END
Well, despite the lack of gore, and the surplus of goofy humor, this one was fairly watchable. At least the body count was high. If the effects budget had been bigger(or indeed, had there been ANY effects budget), this would have kicked some ass with all of the zany murder methods. Oh well, maybe a sequel or remake someday....in the meantime, I give Wishcraft 3.5 killer trees out of 5.
And what did I get from watching Wishcraft?
-Well, wishes can get pretty bland.
Butt-chins turn girls on?
-ANGUS!!!!!!!!!!!!!(sorry, but that was a good movie...)
Next on my list is something called Chain Letter. Pass it on....and have a good week!
Monday, May 21, 2012
Maniac Cop
This week, we have another classic from the 1980's, Maniac Cop. It co-stars the man of a thousand chins, Bruce Campbell. So you have the right to remain entertained, as we enter yet another SPOILER zone...
The movie starts out showing a cop getting into his uniform. You don't see his face, but every time he zips, buttons or snaps something into place, the movie does a freeze-frame. Hey, just for kicks, restart the movie and take a drink every time it does a freeze-frame!
After Officer Doe is finished getting dressed, we see a deserted city strret late at night. A young woman is walking to her car, when a mugger shows up. He and a buddy attack the woman, but after the briefest of struggles, she slips away.
She starts running, and hides in a dark subway station. When she crouches in the shadows, the pair of thugs show up too. She escapes to the street level again, and the muggers follow from a distance. Wow, cautious muggers...weird.
The frightened woman spots a cop, and runs in his direction after shouting "Officer!" about 17 times in a row. As the would-be muggers watch, the cop snaps her neck and throws her to the ground. Ouch!
There's an investigation, followed by a pair of detectives taking a stroll down to the morgue. The medical examiner tells the 2 detectives that the woman was shaken so hard that her head was damaged by the motion, and that the killer's grip was strong enough to crush her larynx. Oh, and the medical examiner has a rockin' mullet that needs to be seen to be believed.
After the medical examiner gives them some space,the detectives begin to argue over how she died. The older one, Frank, is skeptical about 2 teens having the strength necessary to kill the woman. He's also the first person to propose that her killer was a cop, given that several were on a "friendly" basis with her.
Next up: more footage of New York(I guess) at night. A young couple are grinning, laughing, and possibly driving toward their doom. Oh, and they're also drunk, which nearly causes them to speed through a red light. Whoops!
While sitting at the light they kiss, and a certain cop of the maniacal variety knocks on the driver's window. The driver gets out, and Maniac Cop uses a dagger to cut both sides of the guy's face. Then MC picks him up, and tosses him through the windshield of the car, while the poor girlfriend screams.
She manages to get the windshield wipers going, which is always the best way to remove dead boyfriends from the windshield, and she speeds away. Does she escape? I guess so, because the scene just ends right there...
The next scene is in the Cmmisioner's office. Frank pays him a visit to share his theory about the killer being a cop. When he finishes, The Commish doesn't agree. They argue over it, and that's about it.
Another scene at night means another attack. This time it's a man walking to his car. He pops the trunk to put his briefcase in it, and Maniac Cop magically appears. MC handcuffs his arms behind him, then roughly shoves the man against his own car, He once again draws a bladed weapon, and the frightened businessman decides to try to make a run for freedom.
He finds an apartment building with an open dooway, and makes a beeline for the intercom. Because of the handcuffs, the guy uses his nose to push a random buzzer, and begins to shout for help. Rather than wait for a response, the guy decides to lean his head out to see if any sharp blades are coming at him. Smart fella!
He resumes running and shouting, all to no avail. The chase ends when he trips, right in front of some freshly-cemented part of the sidewalk. MC catches up, and holds the man's face down into the wet cement until he dies. When the police arrive the next morning, they have a couple of construction workers drill out the entire square of sidewalk, to preserve the evidence.
Frank calls an old flme, a TV reporter named Tina, and has her meet him at an intimate restaurant. Tina assumes that Frank wants to re-kindle their old spark, but he honestly just wants to warn the public about the killer dressed as a cop. Also, given that Tina has a large audience, due to her talent and beauty, he figures her reporting of the story would do the most good. He then hands her a folder with all of the information she needs, and lets her get started.
Tina's story airs that night, and has the whole city talking about the killer by the next morning. She cites Frank as an anonymous source, but also implies that people should be much less trustful of police officers until the killer is caught. Nice.
That segues into a sequence where a woman is having trouble starting her car. She sees a cop pull up behind her, and immediately assumes the worst. When he puts his face next to her window to offer assistance, the woman removes a gun from her purse, and puts a bullet in his forehead.
The Commish hears about the incident and goes through the roof. Plus, the emergency switchboards are being bombarded by "tips" regarding dangerous police officers, many of which turn out to be grudges by people who've been arrested, as a way to get even. This is almost as bad as the Rodney King riots!
The next scene opens with an anymous cop getting into his uniform. A worried-looking woman in the kitchen is busy clipping out an article about the Maniac Cop. When her husband enters the kitchen, they argue over going to a marriage counselor, and it's pretty obvious that she thinks that he might be the killer on the news.
But he isn't, and do you know why? Because he's Bruce "The Baddest of the Bad-asses" Campbell!!!! Yup. the Chin that defeated more Deadites than you can shake a boomstick at is on the scene. That instantly makes this movie more watchable.
Anyway, the wife starts to ask him why he always has to be on patrol at night, and he tries to make her feel better. Even though it's obvious that he can't be the killer, the writers sure want us to fall for it. After he leaves for work, the wife even gets a call from an anonymous woman, cackling about how he's going to kill again.
The wife decides to do a little snooping, and she follows her husband from a safe distance.... After taking a small gun from her nightstand, of course. She sees him go into a motel room, and manages to get a key from the person in the front office without having a panic attack. When she gets to the motel room and unlocks it, she finds her husband in bed with another woman. Jerry! Jerry! Jerry! (...or "Maury! Maury! Maury!", if you prefer.)
When he tries to talk his way out of being caught, she pulls out her gun. He gets out of the bed and talks her down, and she ends up running away. Well, at least she didn't damage the chin....
Back outside the redundantly named Motel Budget Inn, the kooky wife is naabed by someone in a dark van. Gee, I wonder who it was? The next day, a maid knocks on the door of the motel room, and finds the "other woman" dead, with a deep wound across her throat.
A cop arrives at morning roll call to speak to Bruce, whose character turns out to be named Jack. Jack assumes that his superior, named Ripley, is there on a social call, or is there to discuss Jack's marital issues(because Sarge mentions his wife), but he is quickly informed that she was found murdered. And by the other man's tone, it looks like Jack is their main suspect.
Ripley and Frank question Jack together, in what would best be called a game of "Angry Cop, Bored Cop". They bring out the scrapbook the wife made of the articles about Maniac Cop, and mention that several witnesses saw him at the motel and/or heard the fight that they had. When Jack tries to explain the part about her drawing a gun, they obviously don't buy his version of events.
Luckily, that's about the time when his lawyer shows up. The lawyer shoos them out, then sits down to discuss the case with bJack. Too bad that he thinks that Jack killed her as well. In fact, as soon as he sits down, he tries to get Jack to agree that he killed her while in a state of mental fatigue and under delusions. Nice.
Frank and Ripley go to a bar, and watch a reporter on TV interview random people about how little they trust the police since the killings were made public. Frank expresses the opinion that he believes that Jack is innocent in all of this, and Ripley actually laughs at him. Undeterred, Frank shares another theory: that perhaps Jack is taking the fall for the murders to protect someone else. Ripley scoffs at that one as well.
Frank pays another visit to Jack in his cell, and asks him if he's been protecting his mistress, or maybe some other cop they haven't turned up. Jack firmly tells him that she has nothing to do with the killings either. Then he drops a bombshell on Frank: the girlfriend is also on the police force. He reveals that her name is Theresa, and that she's currently on duty. Instead of doing any kind of follow-up on this information, we get whisked away from Jack's cell, and plopped down on a street corner. Great segue.
In the grand tradition of cop movies, Theresa is going undercover as a hooker. A creepy doofus pulls up to the curb and asks her for a fun time, and she plays dumb, When he grins and asks her if she's a cop, she is honest about it, even encouraging him to go home to his family. He keeps grinning like a fool, and drives away.
Theresa steps into a nearby alley to have a cigarette, and Maniac Cop shows up, While she nervously tries to figure out if he's someone she knows, Frank pulls up to the street corner where's she's supposed to be standing. While he scans the faces of the hooker to try and identify her, Theresa pulls her gun, and shoots at Maniac Cop, hitting him in a few places. He continues walking toward her, his dagger drawn.
Frank hears the commotion and drives right into the alley. By the time that Theresa runs out of ammunition, Frank is out of the car with his gun, and fires several rounds into MC. After he and Theresa escape, MC has been shot in the chest, arms, legs, and even took a shot to the face, yet still walked away from the battle.
They talk about the incident over drinks, and Theresa admits to Frank that she revealed her affair to Sally, a desk cop who works in the filing department. After making sure that Theresa gets settled in at his place for safe-keeping, Frank decides to meet Sally, and heads back to the station.
Sally turns out to be a hardass. Frank drops some details about what happened earlier, to see if she is helping the killer. Sure enough, she leaves the station, and Frank follows her. The drive takes him to the harbor, where he sees Sally speaking to MC.
She tells MC that he should only go after the specific targets that he has a vendetta with, and stop killing innocent people. Frank finds a place to hide, but he bumps into something, and the noise startles Sally and the killer. She calls MC "Matt", and he vanishes from the rendezvous site.
Sally fires a gun, but misses Frank. Then she begs Matt to come back, to no avail. Frank leaves as well, and gets scared out of his wits by some random guy who just happens to be wandering around.
Back behind his desk, Frank reads a file about a former cop named Matt Cordell, AKA Maniac Cop. He was supposedly a crooked cop, and was sent to Sing-Sing, where he was savagely attacked by several other prisoners. They mutilated both his body and face, and it's implied that he was killed.
While talking to another cop, Frank discovers that Sally was Matt's girlfriend. And now that he's seen them together, he also realizes that the full story isn't yet known. With that in mind, Frank chooses to pay a visit to the prison.
Matt has flashbacks, and they reveal that his time in prison was terrible. The other inmates obviously resented him because of his status as a former cop, and made life difficult, even before the attack. Then came the day that made him Maniac Cop....
Matt is taking a shower, and som of the inmates begin to go after him with knives and homemade weapons. He tosses the first few around like rag dolls, but they second wave of attackers overpower him. They hold Matt down and stab him everywhere, including slashes to his face, and leave him on the floor to bleed out.
After that cheerful encounter, there's a reunion between Jack and Theresa, with Frank along to make it awkward. He excuses himself so that they can get all snugglebunnies together, and decides to pay another visit to Sally. The office is empty, so Frank decides to go through her purse, but it only contains a single glove.
Before Frank can do anything else, Sally attacks him from behind with her cane. He manages to get it out of her hands, and Sally tries to get away by holding onto walls and furniture to prevent a fall. She almost does escape, until she finds herself trapped by Matt's latest victim.. Sally screams, and both Theresa and Jack hear her.
Frank comes to the rescue, but MC ambushes him, and proceeds to kick his ass. Jack and Theresa manage to escape the cell during the chaos, and they get another cop killed in the process. MC finishes off Frank, then throws his body through a window.
Theresa and Jack decide to return to Sing Sing, to see if there's anything else they can learn about the attack. They meet the prison doctor, and he confesses that he faked a death certificate for Matt Cordell. He did it because he knew that MC's brain was barely functioning, and another attack by the other inmates would really kill him the next time.
When Theresa and Jack tell him that Matt's been the killer the media's been talking about, he refuses to believe them. But he also has the decency not to call the cops, when he recognizes Jack. He gets them out of his office, just as his nurse mentions that he needs to wear something green, because it's St. Patrick's Day.
As you might expect, the parade for the holiday is swarming with police officers. Jack has an incredibly stupid plan: he wants Theresa to convince the Commish to speak with him, so that he can tell him the entire story about Maniac Cop. While she's doing that, Jack's going to wait out on the street, where anyone can see him, and just hang out.
Theresa finds the Commish and Ripley getting ready to be in the parade, and tells them everything about Cordell, but the Commish spins a version where Jack is doing the killings. Then he calls in a cop to arrest her, while he and Ripley head out. While Theresa is trying not to get raped by the sleazy cop, the 2 other men are ambushed by Maniac Cop.
After finishing them off, Matt goes after Theresa and Lt. Grungy. He stabs the sleazeball in the gut, leaving Theresa with the task of dragging his heavy body to each possible exit, as they are handcuffed to each other. It's as silly as it sounds, trust me. Meanwhile, Jack gets restless, and decides to join her inside.
After locking herself in a small kitchen area, Theresa goes through the dead cop's pockets to find the key for the handcuffs. As she finally accomplishes that single task, Maniac Cop starts to destroy the door to get to her. At the same time, Jack is spotted by several officers, who run into the same building that he just entered.
Theresa escapes onto a building ledge, just as Jack is getting roughed up by the cops. They then force him into the back of a police van. Then Maniac Cop throws the driver out of the vehicle, and speeds off, with Jack as his hostage. Theresa's close behind, after convincing a rookie to follow the van. Both vehicles head for the pier.
Somehow a third car gets in the way, allowing MC to shake the police car's pursuit. Then he injures a guy at a security post, before finally crashing and stopping at a warehouse on Pier 14. Theresa arrives seconds later.
She runs into the building, and Matt finally shows his face, which is scarred and discolored. He prepares to shoot Theresa and Jack, but the dumb rookie wanders in, and dies for being a distraction. Matt then throws Jack across the room, gives Theresa a long look, and drives away in the van again.
Jack chases the vehicle, and manages to hang on to a handle while whipping around like a doll. He distracts Matt enough to send the van sailing into the harbor. Jack jumps away to safety, and he and Theresa watch with a crowd of bystanders when the vehicle is pulled out of the water, empty. Underneath the pier, you see a white glove emerge from the water, to get a firm grip on the pier. THE END
Boy, what a kooky movie! Crazy action scenes, Bruce Campbell mostly playing it straight, and women who were glammed up and frizzed out, in pure '80's style. I have to admit, despite the weirdness, I enjoyed it. 4 out of 5 killer trees for this one.
And what did I learn after seeing Maniac Cop?
-Well, if I ever get stabbed and beaten within an inch of life, I'll become superhuman!
-All cops act like characters in a Mickeyb Spillane novel.
-Going to a seedy bar solves any problem in the world.
Next up, I'll be watching Wishcraft, starring some guy who co-stars on House, and a blond who I've seen in a few other horror films, but damn I can never remember her name. Fun times. See you sometime in the next week!
The movie starts out showing a cop getting into his uniform. You don't see his face, but every time he zips, buttons or snaps something into place, the movie does a freeze-frame. Hey, just for kicks, restart the movie and take a drink every time it does a freeze-frame!
After Officer Doe is finished getting dressed, we see a deserted city strret late at night. A young woman is walking to her car, when a mugger shows up. He and a buddy attack the woman, but after the briefest of struggles, she slips away.
She starts running, and hides in a dark subway station. When she crouches in the shadows, the pair of thugs show up too. She escapes to the street level again, and the muggers follow from a distance. Wow, cautious muggers...weird.
The frightened woman spots a cop, and runs in his direction after shouting "Officer!" about 17 times in a row. As the would-be muggers watch, the cop snaps her neck and throws her to the ground. Ouch!
There's an investigation, followed by a pair of detectives taking a stroll down to the morgue. The medical examiner tells the 2 detectives that the woman was shaken so hard that her head was damaged by the motion, and that the killer's grip was strong enough to crush her larynx. Oh, and the medical examiner has a rockin' mullet that needs to be seen to be believed.
After the medical examiner gives them some space,the detectives begin to argue over how she died. The older one, Frank, is skeptical about 2 teens having the strength necessary to kill the woman. He's also the first person to propose that her killer was a cop, given that several were on a "friendly" basis with her.
Next up: more footage of New York(I guess) at night. A young couple are grinning, laughing, and possibly driving toward their doom. Oh, and they're also drunk, which nearly causes them to speed through a red light. Whoops!
While sitting at the light they kiss, and a certain cop of the maniacal variety knocks on the driver's window. The driver gets out, and Maniac Cop uses a dagger to cut both sides of the guy's face. Then MC picks him up, and tosses him through the windshield of the car, while the poor girlfriend screams.
She manages to get the windshield wipers going, which is always the best way to remove dead boyfriends from the windshield, and she speeds away. Does she escape? I guess so, because the scene just ends right there...
The next scene is in the Cmmisioner's office. Frank pays him a visit to share his theory about the killer being a cop. When he finishes, The Commish doesn't agree. They argue over it, and that's about it.
Another scene at night means another attack. This time it's a man walking to his car. He pops the trunk to put his briefcase in it, and Maniac Cop magically appears. MC handcuffs his arms behind him, then roughly shoves the man against his own car, He once again draws a bladed weapon, and the frightened businessman decides to try to make a run for freedom.
He finds an apartment building with an open dooway, and makes a beeline for the intercom. Because of the handcuffs, the guy uses his nose to push a random buzzer, and begins to shout for help. Rather than wait for a response, the guy decides to lean his head out to see if any sharp blades are coming at him. Smart fella!
He resumes running and shouting, all to no avail. The chase ends when he trips, right in front of some freshly-cemented part of the sidewalk. MC catches up, and holds the man's face down into the wet cement until he dies. When the police arrive the next morning, they have a couple of construction workers drill out the entire square of sidewalk, to preserve the evidence.
Frank calls an old flme, a TV reporter named Tina, and has her meet him at an intimate restaurant. Tina assumes that Frank wants to re-kindle their old spark, but he honestly just wants to warn the public about the killer dressed as a cop. Also, given that Tina has a large audience, due to her talent and beauty, he figures her reporting of the story would do the most good. He then hands her a folder with all of the information she needs, and lets her get started.
Tina's story airs that night, and has the whole city talking about the killer by the next morning. She cites Frank as an anonymous source, but also implies that people should be much less trustful of police officers until the killer is caught. Nice.
That segues into a sequence where a woman is having trouble starting her car. She sees a cop pull up behind her, and immediately assumes the worst. When he puts his face next to her window to offer assistance, the woman removes a gun from her purse, and puts a bullet in his forehead.
The Commish hears about the incident and goes through the roof. Plus, the emergency switchboards are being bombarded by "tips" regarding dangerous police officers, many of which turn out to be grudges by people who've been arrested, as a way to get even. This is almost as bad as the Rodney King riots!
The next scene opens with an anymous cop getting into his uniform. A worried-looking woman in the kitchen is busy clipping out an article about the Maniac Cop. When her husband enters the kitchen, they argue over going to a marriage counselor, and it's pretty obvious that she thinks that he might be the killer on the news.
But he isn't, and do you know why? Because he's Bruce "The Baddest of the Bad-asses" Campbell!!!! Yup. the Chin that defeated more Deadites than you can shake a boomstick at is on the scene. That instantly makes this movie more watchable.
Anyway, the wife starts to ask him why he always has to be on patrol at night, and he tries to make her feel better. Even though it's obvious that he can't be the killer, the writers sure want us to fall for it. After he leaves for work, the wife even gets a call from an anonymous woman, cackling about how he's going to kill again.
The wife decides to do a little snooping, and she follows her husband from a safe distance.... After taking a small gun from her nightstand, of course. She sees him go into a motel room, and manages to get a key from the person in the front office without having a panic attack. When she gets to the motel room and unlocks it, she finds her husband in bed with another woman. Jerry! Jerry! Jerry! (...or "Maury! Maury! Maury!", if you prefer.)
When he tries to talk his way out of being caught, she pulls out her gun. He gets out of the bed and talks her down, and she ends up running away. Well, at least she didn't damage the chin....
Back outside the redundantly named Motel Budget Inn, the kooky wife is naabed by someone in a dark van. Gee, I wonder who it was? The next day, a maid knocks on the door of the motel room, and finds the "other woman" dead, with a deep wound across her throat.
A cop arrives at morning roll call to speak to Bruce, whose character turns out to be named Jack. Jack assumes that his superior, named Ripley, is there on a social call, or is there to discuss Jack's marital issues(because Sarge mentions his wife), but he is quickly informed that she was found murdered. And by the other man's tone, it looks like Jack is their main suspect.
Ripley and Frank question Jack together, in what would best be called a game of "Angry Cop, Bored Cop". They bring out the scrapbook the wife made of the articles about Maniac Cop, and mention that several witnesses saw him at the motel and/or heard the fight that they had. When Jack tries to explain the part about her drawing a gun, they obviously don't buy his version of events.
Luckily, that's about the time when his lawyer shows up. The lawyer shoos them out, then sits down to discuss the case with bJack. Too bad that he thinks that Jack killed her as well. In fact, as soon as he sits down, he tries to get Jack to agree that he killed her while in a state of mental fatigue and under delusions. Nice.
Frank and Ripley go to a bar, and watch a reporter on TV interview random people about how little they trust the police since the killings were made public. Frank expresses the opinion that he believes that Jack is innocent in all of this, and Ripley actually laughs at him. Undeterred, Frank shares another theory: that perhaps Jack is taking the fall for the murders to protect someone else. Ripley scoffs at that one as well.
Frank pays another visit to Jack in his cell, and asks him if he's been protecting his mistress, or maybe some other cop they haven't turned up. Jack firmly tells him that she has nothing to do with the killings either. Then he drops a bombshell on Frank: the girlfriend is also on the police force. He reveals that her name is Theresa, and that she's currently on duty. Instead of doing any kind of follow-up on this information, we get whisked away from Jack's cell, and plopped down on a street corner. Great segue.
In the grand tradition of cop movies, Theresa is going undercover as a hooker. A creepy doofus pulls up to the curb and asks her for a fun time, and she plays dumb, When he grins and asks her if she's a cop, she is honest about it, even encouraging him to go home to his family. He keeps grinning like a fool, and drives away.
Theresa steps into a nearby alley to have a cigarette, and Maniac Cop shows up, While she nervously tries to figure out if he's someone she knows, Frank pulls up to the street corner where's she's supposed to be standing. While he scans the faces of the hooker to try and identify her, Theresa pulls her gun, and shoots at Maniac Cop, hitting him in a few places. He continues walking toward her, his dagger drawn.
Frank hears the commotion and drives right into the alley. By the time that Theresa runs out of ammunition, Frank is out of the car with his gun, and fires several rounds into MC. After he and Theresa escape, MC has been shot in the chest, arms, legs, and even took a shot to the face, yet still walked away from the battle.
They talk about the incident over drinks, and Theresa admits to Frank that she revealed her affair to Sally, a desk cop who works in the filing department. After making sure that Theresa gets settled in at his place for safe-keeping, Frank decides to meet Sally, and heads back to the station.
Sally turns out to be a hardass. Frank drops some details about what happened earlier, to see if she is helping the killer. Sure enough, she leaves the station, and Frank follows her. The drive takes him to the harbor, where he sees Sally speaking to MC.
She tells MC that he should only go after the specific targets that he has a vendetta with, and stop killing innocent people. Frank finds a place to hide, but he bumps into something, and the noise startles Sally and the killer. She calls MC "Matt", and he vanishes from the rendezvous site.
Sally fires a gun, but misses Frank. Then she begs Matt to come back, to no avail. Frank leaves as well, and gets scared out of his wits by some random guy who just happens to be wandering around.
Back behind his desk, Frank reads a file about a former cop named Matt Cordell, AKA Maniac Cop. He was supposedly a crooked cop, and was sent to Sing-Sing, where he was savagely attacked by several other prisoners. They mutilated both his body and face, and it's implied that he was killed.
While talking to another cop, Frank discovers that Sally was Matt's girlfriend. And now that he's seen them together, he also realizes that the full story isn't yet known. With that in mind, Frank chooses to pay a visit to the prison.
Matt has flashbacks, and they reveal that his time in prison was terrible. The other inmates obviously resented him because of his status as a former cop, and made life difficult, even before the attack. Then came the day that made him Maniac Cop....
Matt is taking a shower, and som of the inmates begin to go after him with knives and homemade weapons. He tosses the first few around like rag dolls, but they second wave of attackers overpower him. They hold Matt down and stab him everywhere, including slashes to his face, and leave him on the floor to bleed out.
After that cheerful encounter, there's a reunion between Jack and Theresa, with Frank along to make it awkward. He excuses himself so that they can get all snugglebunnies together, and decides to pay another visit to Sally. The office is empty, so Frank decides to go through her purse, but it only contains a single glove.
Before Frank can do anything else, Sally attacks him from behind with her cane. He manages to get it out of her hands, and Sally tries to get away by holding onto walls and furniture to prevent a fall. She almost does escape, until she finds herself trapped by Matt's latest victim.. Sally screams, and both Theresa and Jack hear her.
Frank comes to the rescue, but MC ambushes him, and proceeds to kick his ass. Jack and Theresa manage to escape the cell during the chaos, and they get another cop killed in the process. MC finishes off Frank, then throws his body through a window.
Theresa and Jack decide to return to Sing Sing, to see if there's anything else they can learn about the attack. They meet the prison doctor, and he confesses that he faked a death certificate for Matt Cordell. He did it because he knew that MC's brain was barely functioning, and another attack by the other inmates would really kill him the next time.
When Theresa and Jack tell him that Matt's been the killer the media's been talking about, he refuses to believe them. But he also has the decency not to call the cops, when he recognizes Jack. He gets them out of his office, just as his nurse mentions that he needs to wear something green, because it's St. Patrick's Day.
As you might expect, the parade for the holiday is swarming with police officers. Jack has an incredibly stupid plan: he wants Theresa to convince the Commish to speak with him, so that he can tell him the entire story about Maniac Cop. While she's doing that, Jack's going to wait out on the street, where anyone can see him, and just hang out.
Theresa finds the Commish and Ripley getting ready to be in the parade, and tells them everything about Cordell, but the Commish spins a version where Jack is doing the killings. Then he calls in a cop to arrest her, while he and Ripley head out. While Theresa is trying not to get raped by the sleazy cop, the 2 other men are ambushed by Maniac Cop.
After finishing them off, Matt goes after Theresa and Lt. Grungy. He stabs the sleazeball in the gut, leaving Theresa with the task of dragging his heavy body to each possible exit, as they are handcuffed to each other. It's as silly as it sounds, trust me. Meanwhile, Jack gets restless, and decides to join her inside.
After locking herself in a small kitchen area, Theresa goes through the dead cop's pockets to find the key for the handcuffs. As she finally accomplishes that single task, Maniac Cop starts to destroy the door to get to her. At the same time, Jack is spotted by several officers, who run into the same building that he just entered.
Theresa escapes onto a building ledge, just as Jack is getting roughed up by the cops. They then force him into the back of a police van. Then Maniac Cop throws the driver out of the vehicle, and speeds off, with Jack as his hostage. Theresa's close behind, after convincing a rookie to follow the van. Both vehicles head for the pier.
Somehow a third car gets in the way, allowing MC to shake the police car's pursuit. Then he injures a guy at a security post, before finally crashing and stopping at a warehouse on Pier 14. Theresa arrives seconds later.
She runs into the building, and Matt finally shows his face, which is scarred and discolored. He prepares to shoot Theresa and Jack, but the dumb rookie wanders in, and dies for being a distraction. Matt then throws Jack across the room, gives Theresa a long look, and drives away in the van again.
Jack chases the vehicle, and manages to hang on to a handle while whipping around like a doll. He distracts Matt enough to send the van sailing into the harbor. Jack jumps away to safety, and he and Theresa watch with a crowd of bystanders when the vehicle is pulled out of the water, empty. Underneath the pier, you see a white glove emerge from the water, to get a firm grip on the pier. THE END
Boy, what a kooky movie! Crazy action scenes, Bruce Campbell mostly playing it straight, and women who were glammed up and frizzed out, in pure '80's style. I have to admit, despite the weirdness, I enjoyed it. 4 out of 5 killer trees for this one.
And what did I learn after seeing Maniac Cop?
-Well, if I ever get stabbed and beaten within an inch of life, I'll become superhuman!
-All cops act like characters in a Mickeyb Spillane novel.
-Going to a seedy bar solves any problem in the world.
Next up, I'll be watching Wishcraft, starring some guy who co-stars on House, and a blond who I've seen in a few other horror films, but damn I can never remember her name. Fun times. See you sometime in the next week!
Monday, May 14, 2012
Tourist Trap
According to BallBuster, even though I sent the last 2 movies I rented from them went back over the previous weekend, my next 2 won't arrive until the middle of this week. So....I found a watchable version of Tourist Trap, a slasher from the late '70's starring old cowboy actor Chuck Connors. Hey, it's better than nothing....prepare for SPOILERS...
The theme song is our first clue that this is going to be weird...it's like something you'd expect to hear in a Saturday morning cartoon show. Very strange song choice for an opening theme, it's just an assortment of sound effects and some off-key notes.. Thankfully, the opening credits are brief...uh oh, did I just see Charles Band's name in the credits? Crap, please don't let this be a cheesy stop-motion killer puppet film!
The first scene shows an unlucky guy wearing a pink shirt and a Gilligan-style hat, while rolling a tire down a dusty, empty road. He stops rolling the tire long enough to open a canteen, but it's empty. He apparently can't figure that one out, so he tips the empty canteen above his head to look up into it. Yup, still empty Einstein.
Lunkhead's name is Woody. Funny, my bet was on Moose. Anyway, after he fully explores the intricacies of the canteen, he swears, then resumes his journey. As luck would have it, Woody passes a sign that promises "GAS EATS-AHEAD". Okay, so either someone ahead is serving food that tastes like gasoline, or the movie features a gas creature that will devour a head while we watch...either way, it sounds better than watching Nimrod here rolling a tire. Bring it on!
Back at Woody's car, a woman is sitting under some shade and listening to the weather report on the nearest radio station. A jeep pulls up, and all three of the occupants know the girl. The girl sitting next to Woody's car is Woody's girlfriend, Eileen. The others are Jerry, Becky and Molly. The others seem kind of generic, but Becky is played by Tanya Roberts, a former "Bond girl"(and also Midge from That '70's Show.). Hubba.
As they all fret over poor Woody, he finally finds the gas station. Right on cue, ominous music starts playing. He ditches the tire, and struts into the gas station like he owns the place. When he calls out for service and no one answers, he decides to explore.
He finds what might be a simple bedroom/office, and hears a weird moaning sound coming from a figure on a nearby cot. They're mostly covered up by a blanket, so Woody moves in for a closer look. When he nudges the blanket, the figure pops up, revealing itself to be a mannequin with a hinged mouth that appears to be laughing at him.
As Woody backs off, the door he entered through slams shut, locking him in. Then a window opens up on its own, but shuts before he gets near it. As Woody examines a second window, another dummy flies through the glass toward him. Then a third one falls out of a closet, laughing like the first one did.
That's bizarre enough for Woody, but it gets even weirder when a mannequin head on the floor turns around to look at him, followed by more giggling. Deciding that he's had enough, Woody makes a hole in the door, and tries to disengage the lock with one hand. He then feels something grab him from the other side of the door, and freaks out. As he screams, objects throughout the room start flying at him, culminating in a metal bar spearing Woody in his spine and sticking him to the door. Then everything goes still again.
His friends, now all in the jeep, find a sign advertising "Slausen's Lost Oasis", which is some kind of "western" museum. They decide to pay it a visit, perhaps hoping that Woody also saw it. They continue down the road, failing to see a sign proclaiming the museum to be closed. Or maybe it's the road that was closed. I dunno, somebody nudge me if I nod off before the next kill.
So, the Cheap Jeep dies just as they arrive at a nice clearing. As Jerry sets up to try and fix his vehicle, the girls abandon him to explore the area. They find a refreshing-looking body of water, and decide to go skinny-dipping. Somebody better go tell Jerry, before he misses all the fun!
Molly tries to persuade Becky and Eileen not to do it, but they pretty much ignore her reluctance. She eventually joins them, so I guess peer pressure wins in the end! We get a few brief glimpses of Jerry fiddling with doodads under the hood of the jeep, in between scenes of the girls frolicking in the water. Oh, and someone hiding in the woods is watching them...
That "someone" is Mr. Slausen himself, proprietor of the legendary western museum. He's holding a shotgun, so either he's hunting wascally wabbits, or our group is trespassing on his property. He surprises them when he appears, then they get even more nervous when he decides to sit at the water's edge and have a chat. And a good look.
He tells them that the body of water is, indeed, on his land. Then Slausen advises the 3 girls not to stay too long in the water, because water moccasins tend to swim there and like to bite unsuspecting swimmers. Then he cackles and disappears back into the woods.
Jerry finds the girls all laughing, and they tell him about meeting Mr. Slausen. As they make their way back to the jeep, they find the redneck waiting for them. He hears about the engine trouble, and offers to drive the group to his house, where they can call a tow truck. After a brief moment of hesitation, Molly decides to accept his invitation, and the rest follow like sheep.
Slausen brings them to the museum, and encourages them to explore. One of them says that most of the stuff on display is junk, and Mr. Slausen mentions that many of the items belonged to his late wife. D'oh!
When he's complimented over how life-like his mannequins seem, Slausen reveals that they were created by his brother, who was a gifted artist. Oh, and he's bitter because a new highway that was built rerouted most drivers away from his business. Um, did my film get switched with the House of Wax remake when I wasn't looking?
Anyway, Slausen freaks them out by showing them that his figures are animatronic. At the push of a button, a figure springs up, aims a rifle at the visitors, and fires a blank at them. Slausen laughs when they get scared, and tells them that he used to love to freak out children with the robotic figures. Okaaaay......
One of the girls notices a house nearby, and asks if Slausen lives there. He mentions that someone named Davey used to live in the house, but Slausen actually lives in the museum itself. And none of his guests find that odd? Yeah, right.
Slausen tells the girls that he and Jerry will fix the jeep, and asks them to "guard" the museum until they return. Before they go, Slausen also tells the girls that the phone doesn't work. Heh, can you imagine what would happen to a group of teens today if their 90 gazillion Iphones and wireless tablets didn't work in the same scenario? You'd have about a 20-minute slasher flick, because they wouldn't be able to cope!
The second that the 2 guys exit the museum, Eileen announces that she plans to head to the isolated, spooky house in the distance, to see if they have a working phone. The other girls try to talk her out of it, but she's determined to find a phone. She tells her friends to form a posse if she doesn't return in 10 minutes.
It's incredibly dark outside, but Eileen makes her way to the house in one piece. She hears a voice inside, and calls out. When no one responds, Eileen finds the front door unlocked, and boldly walks right in.
She sees an elderly man with his back to her, and an elderly woman in a rocking chair. She steps into the room to speak to them, before realizing that they're both mannequins. She calls out to Woody, and tries the next room. More mannequins. Eileen spots a mirror and adjusts a red scarfl that she's wearing, then sees someone come into the room behind her. The mirror breaks, and she screams.
The masked figure seems to have telekinesis, and makes all of the windows slam shut just by looking at them. Then he does the same thing to the doors, and slides a chair at Eileen's legs without touching it. The masked killer makes Eileen's own scarf strangle her, and she preumably dies.
Becky and Molly get worried when Eileen doesn't return, and then they hear something moving around outside. It's only Mr. Slausen, who apologizes for scaring them. He pops open a can of soda, then begins to tell the girls about his late wife. The story comes to a screeching halt though, when Slausen realizes that Eileen is no longer in the room. He gets upset, and stomps away to find her.
Slausen heads directly to the nearby house. He calls out to "Davey", but no one responds, so Slausen decides to have a look around, He finds Eileen almost immediately, turned into a mannequin, but wearing the same clothes as before.
Back at the wax museum, Molly and Becky are starting to get restless. Molly finds a photo album, and sees some pictures of Slausen and another person(probably his brother). Then Molly finds a photo of Slausen's wife, and she bears a striking resemblance to one of the nearby mannequins. Uh oh....
Slausen interrupts them, and tells the pair that he made the figure to keep the memory of his wife alive. Then he announces that he's going to where they left the jeep, to see if maybe Eileen decided to head there for whatever reason.
Once again, as soon as Slausen exits the museum, the 2 girls also decide to leave. Instead of following Slausen, they head directly for the mysterious house. An upstairs window is lit up, and they guess that Eileen and Woody are probably fooling around in the house. Becky decides to go in, but Molly gets cold feet and declines the offer to go with her friend.
Becky climbs up to a second floor window, leaving the other girl shivering outside by herself. Becky can't see her own hand in front of her face in the dark house, so she turns on a flashlight. She tries to get Eileen to give away her location by speaking to her directly, but no one replies. The white-masked killer shows up in the background though, ready to claim another victim.
As Becky creeps down the hallway, the killer follows from a short distance behind her. Becky opens a bedroom door, and sees another mannequin, wearing Eileen's clothing. She comes up behind the figure, and sees that it's a wax figure, but then it lunges at her.
Frightened by the sudden movement, Becky btries to escape back to the hallway, but the killer then attacks her. Just as it happened earlier, all of the doors and windows slam shut, and the killer pushes Becky to the floor. She knocks him out with a mannequin body part, and crawls away, only to be buried as an avalanche of mannequins topple on top of her.
When she wakes up, Becky finds herself tied up along with Jerry. Also, there's a girl named Tina strapped down on a table. It looks like the basement of the house, so that must be where the killer "creates" the mannequins. Now, who the heck is Tina, and why is she tied to a table???
The killer tells Tina that he brought the others down to visit her, and she begs for her life. What follows is almost directly ripped-off in the movie House of Wax. Seriously, the makers of that film obviously saw this one.
Jerry tells the girls that the killer behind the mask is Slausen's psychotic brother, Davey. Then Tina chimes in, and informs them that he abducted her when she drove into his station to get some gas. She also tells them that they can't escape, and that they'll all end up dead soon. Well, Tina sure seems like a ray of sunshine, huh?
Anyway, that wasn't the part House of Wax cribbed from(well, kind of, but something else happens that...oh, you'll see!)....I guess it comes up later. Anyway, we go back to the museum, where Molly is getting restless. Nothing happens to her, andf we see the killer changing his costume. Then he returns to the captives in the basement, and tries to force them all to drink something he poured into a cup.
Okay, here's the scene I thought happened earlier. The killer immobilizes Ttina's head with a strap, Then, while Tina begins to sob, he applies plaster to her face. He describes the process to Tina as he covers up various parts of her face, saving her nose for last. As her air is cut off, he tells her that her heart will burst before she suffocates. Then she has a few body spasms, and dies. (more or less the same thing that happened to Jared Padalecki in House of Wax....except that his death was a more prolonged one)
As the killer admires his handiwork, Jerry breaks free and jumps at him. They wrestle briefly, but the killer throws Jerry off of him with superhuman strength. Jerry hits a wall, and is dazed long enough for the killer to strangle him to death.
Back in the museum, the supposedly-broken phone rings. Molly answers it, but no one responds. She grabs yet another flashlight, and leaves the museum. After she exits the building, the display holding the figure of Slausen's wife suddenly turns on.
In the basement of the house, the masked killer keeps droning on and on about his motives and his brother. Someone should tell Hollywood that the killers are 100% scarier when they shut up...While the killer drones on and on and on, the captives spot a key on the floor and try to grab it. The killer is just toying with them though, and he uses his telekinetic ability to slide it around the floor while taunting them.
Out in the fog, Molly gets scared when she hears someone near her whispering. The killer leaps up from behind a nearby bush, and shoves a mannequin head near Molly. The head has a hinged mouth and screams, which sends the poor girl off and running. The killer follows, but at almost a leisurely pace.
Molly is stopped by a tall metal fence, so she quickly scrambles over it. The killer throws the mannequin head over the fence in her direction. Where it lands, it turns toward her and starts to move again on its own. Molly travels down a stream and then through some more forest.
Eventually, she finds a road, and sees a truck coming around a bend. She flags it down, and finds Slausen behind the wheel. As she freaks out, he starts to drive. She tells him that the killer needs to be stopped, but Slausen reveals that he wants to capture his brother himself, because he thinks that he can reason with him. Molly sure is dumb.
At the house, Slausen gives Molly a shotgun. He shows her how to use it, then goes inside. When she calls his name and he fails to respond, Molly has a panic attack. She continues to shout his name, unaware that the masked killer has emerged from behind the truck. Molly hears him at the last second, and turns, pointing the rifle right at the killer.
Molly fires the gun, and finds that it's filled with blanks. As the killer teases her, she swings the gun like a club, smacking him in the face. The plaster crumbles, revealing that the killer is....Mr. Slausen! Rut roh! Molly drops the rifle, and escapes into the woods. She decides to hide someplace that is completely exposed, which is about as stupid as a stupid plan can be. Why am I not surprised?
She thinks that she sees him coming at her from the woods, so she does something else stupid: she wades into the lake/pond/whatever, and just stands there like Queen Doofus of the Doofus Brigade. Slausen somehow manages to pop up from the water behind Molly without her hearing him, and by the time she sees him, he manages to shove her under the water with a minimum of effort.
Jerry and Becky try to break free While Slausen has a "meal" with one of the wax figures. He puts another mask on, and the figure across the table sits up. Using a combination of telekinesis and ventriloquism, Slausen and his "date" have tea and crackers...until the mannequin's head rolls off.
In the upstairs bedroom, Molly wakes up in bed. Wait, so Slausen didn't drown her? Why??? She tries to sit up, but is strapped down like Tina was in the basement. Slausen enters the room, and tells Molly that if she behaves, he'll reward her. When she begs him to let her go, he tells her that he can't.
In the basement, Jerry finally gets free. He sets Becky loose also, then they sneak back upstairs. They emerge into a mannequin storeroom, and Slausen is seen nearby playing with his dolls, while dressed as a woman. Can this movie possibly get any weirder?
Slausen hears them moving around, and leaves his "dolls" to investigate. Jerry backs up and tries to act like a dummy, which comes to him naturally. Slausen looks in both directions of the hall, then leaves. Jerry relaxes and continues on his way, followed by Becky.
Jerry tries a few doors, then Slausen emerges from a room nearby, and scares the willies out of the guy. Taking no chances, Jerry simply leaps out of the nearest window. Slausen finds him brushing off broken glass and splintered wood, and they end up having a chase sequence anyway.
Then we see Becky running around in the woods, being chased by nobody. Makes sense. Instead of hiding in the trees(or behind one, at least), she finds a path lit by lamps and stops there. Wait, is the plot twist maybe that they want to get killed? It sure does seem that way...
Anyway, she's found by Slausen, who puts on the whole "nice guy" act again. He picks her up off of the ground, and carries her back to the museum, like a monster from a movie in the 1930's. He puts her on his bed, then tells Becky that he needs his "doctoring kit".
She does what they all have done so far...she waits a few seconds, gets all worked up, then starts to call out his name. Using his ventriloquism, Slausen starts with his usual errie whispering from different areas of the room. Been there, done that. Got any new tricks?
Well, it turns out that he does have a new trick! He waits for Becky to reach a certain spot, then he makes one of the wax figures pop up in front of her. When she screams he laughs, and Becky sees him aqcross the room, sitting comfortably and watching her.
Before she can react, more mannequins pop up, and begin firing real bullets at the poor girl. Becky ducks and covers, and manages to avoid the gunfire. Not to be defeated, Slausen makes a figure of a stereotypical American Indian throw a hatchet at her. The first one misses, but the second one plants itself squarely in the back of her skull, killing Becky. It takes her a week to die, though, as she "emotes" and reaches for the weapon's handle, then slides to the floor. Bravo, Shatner. One by one, Slausen uses his "powers" to turn off all of the wax figure display lights.
Molly wakes up again, and a kind-looking woman next to the bed gives her something to drink and dabs her forehead. Then the woman backs away, and Slausen enters the bedroom. Molly feigns being asleep, and Slausen lifts her out of the bed and carries her down the hall. So I guess the woman was either part of a dream sequence, or maybe another wax figure?
Slausen brings her to his play area, where they are surrounded by mannequins. Then Slausen pretends to be napping, to see what Molly will do. As you probably expected, Molly drops the act, looks around cautiously, then tries to crawl away from the loon as slowly as she can. That's when the various figures in the room have their hinged jaws go slack, and they "sing". This movie is like a one-trick pony, minus a trick.
When Molly screams and covers her head with both arms, Slausen decides to stop goofing around. He drags her to his brother's room, and tells her that she's "special" to him. He asks her to tell him that she loves him, and Molly complies. then Slausen backs away from her, and admits that he murdered his family members too. DUH. He found his wife in bed with his brother, and decided that a divorce was too messy, I guess.
Supposedly, he decided to make a wax figure of her AFTER he committed the murders, but I'm not convinced that he didn't just do to her what he did to Tina and the others. Some sappy music plays, as if we're supposed to feel sorry for the nut. Yeah, that'll happen.
After telling his tale, Slausen tells Molly that she'll have to join the others. Right on cue, Jerry comes to the rescue. Molly calls his name, and Jerry finally gets the door open. He tells Molly to come with him, and Slausen seems to hang back, to see what she does next. Molly creeps toward Jerry, then gets behind him, and hugs him around the waist.
Jerry demands to know what Slausen did with the rest of their friends, and Slausen plays dumb. I guess Jerry has a major gap in his short-term memory. Slausen laughs while Molly urges him to shoot the maniac. Remember when I said earlier that the movie had become as bizarre as it could? Well, prepare to watch me eat my words....
Slausen laughs at the idea of Jerry harming him, then tears the dumbfounded guy's arm off. Then he rips off Jerry's head, and knocks the mannequin over, to the horror of a shocked Molly. Slausen tells her to look around, and she discovers that her friends are all mannequins, yet alive too.
Slausen then dances with one of them, and she seems to be alive as well. Then a bunch of "scary" mannequins come forward, laughing, so Molly grabs an axe. As all of the mannequins to a hinge-jaw scream, she buries the weapon in Slausen's shoulder, near his neck.
He staggers around, trying to pull the blade out. Then he keels over, and Molly lets out an ear-piercing wail of anguish. A final scene shows Molly speeding away in the jeep, with the mannequins of her friends in the vehicle with her. Oh, and she's grinning like this was the best summer vacation EVER. THE END
Wow, what a seriously nutty movie. And there were absolutely no answers to anything that we saw happen--or, indeed, if it even did happen! All I can say for sure is, I'm fairly certain that the folks who made the House of Wax remake were influenced by at least some parts of this movie.
And what did I learn after watching Tourist Trap?
-Well, if you run away from a deranged killer, don't stop to admire the wide open scenery. Dumbasses.
-When choosing your friends, try not to pick ones that are anything other than flesh and blood...
-Blank rounds and bullets can transform into each other like magic, and no explanation is ever needed.
Okay, so if last week's movie finally arrives, I'll be watching Maniac Cop by mid-week. If not, I'm not really sure what I'll watch next. We'll just have to see...
The theme song is our first clue that this is going to be weird...it's like something you'd expect to hear in a Saturday morning cartoon show. Very strange song choice for an opening theme, it's just an assortment of sound effects and some off-key notes.. Thankfully, the opening credits are brief...uh oh, did I just see Charles Band's name in the credits? Crap, please don't let this be a cheesy stop-motion killer puppet film!
The first scene shows an unlucky guy wearing a pink shirt and a Gilligan-style hat, while rolling a tire down a dusty, empty road. He stops rolling the tire long enough to open a canteen, but it's empty. He apparently can't figure that one out, so he tips the empty canteen above his head to look up into it. Yup, still empty Einstein.
Lunkhead's name is Woody. Funny, my bet was on Moose. Anyway, after he fully explores the intricacies of the canteen, he swears, then resumes his journey. As luck would have it, Woody passes a sign that promises "GAS EATS-AHEAD". Okay, so either someone ahead is serving food that tastes like gasoline, or the movie features a gas creature that will devour a head while we watch...either way, it sounds better than watching Nimrod here rolling a tire. Bring it on!
Back at Woody's car, a woman is sitting under some shade and listening to the weather report on the nearest radio station. A jeep pulls up, and all three of the occupants know the girl. The girl sitting next to Woody's car is Woody's girlfriend, Eileen. The others are Jerry, Becky and Molly. The others seem kind of generic, but Becky is played by Tanya Roberts, a former "Bond girl"(and also Midge from That '70's Show.). Hubba.
As they all fret over poor Woody, he finally finds the gas station. Right on cue, ominous music starts playing. He ditches the tire, and struts into the gas station like he owns the place. When he calls out for service and no one answers, he decides to explore.
He finds what might be a simple bedroom/office, and hears a weird moaning sound coming from a figure on a nearby cot. They're mostly covered up by a blanket, so Woody moves in for a closer look. When he nudges the blanket, the figure pops up, revealing itself to be a mannequin with a hinged mouth that appears to be laughing at him.
As Woody backs off, the door he entered through slams shut, locking him in. Then a window opens up on its own, but shuts before he gets near it. As Woody examines a second window, another dummy flies through the glass toward him. Then a third one falls out of a closet, laughing like the first one did.
That's bizarre enough for Woody, but it gets even weirder when a mannequin head on the floor turns around to look at him, followed by more giggling. Deciding that he's had enough, Woody makes a hole in the door, and tries to disengage the lock with one hand. He then feels something grab him from the other side of the door, and freaks out. As he screams, objects throughout the room start flying at him, culminating in a metal bar spearing Woody in his spine and sticking him to the door. Then everything goes still again.
His friends, now all in the jeep, find a sign advertising "Slausen's Lost Oasis", which is some kind of "western" museum. They decide to pay it a visit, perhaps hoping that Woody also saw it. They continue down the road, failing to see a sign proclaiming the museum to be closed. Or maybe it's the road that was closed. I dunno, somebody nudge me if I nod off before the next kill.
So, the Cheap Jeep dies just as they arrive at a nice clearing. As Jerry sets up to try and fix his vehicle, the girls abandon him to explore the area. They find a refreshing-looking body of water, and decide to go skinny-dipping. Somebody better go tell Jerry, before he misses all the fun!
Molly tries to persuade Becky and Eileen not to do it, but they pretty much ignore her reluctance. She eventually joins them, so I guess peer pressure wins in the end! We get a few brief glimpses of Jerry fiddling with doodads under the hood of the jeep, in between scenes of the girls frolicking in the water. Oh, and someone hiding in the woods is watching them...
That "someone" is Mr. Slausen himself, proprietor of the legendary western museum. He's holding a shotgun, so either he's hunting wascally wabbits, or our group is trespassing on his property. He surprises them when he appears, then they get even more nervous when he decides to sit at the water's edge and have a chat. And a good look.
He tells them that the body of water is, indeed, on his land. Then Slausen advises the 3 girls not to stay too long in the water, because water moccasins tend to swim there and like to bite unsuspecting swimmers. Then he cackles and disappears back into the woods.
Jerry finds the girls all laughing, and they tell him about meeting Mr. Slausen. As they make their way back to the jeep, they find the redneck waiting for them. He hears about the engine trouble, and offers to drive the group to his house, where they can call a tow truck. After a brief moment of hesitation, Molly decides to accept his invitation, and the rest follow like sheep.
Slausen brings them to the museum, and encourages them to explore. One of them says that most of the stuff on display is junk, and Mr. Slausen mentions that many of the items belonged to his late wife. D'oh!
When he's complimented over how life-like his mannequins seem, Slausen reveals that they were created by his brother, who was a gifted artist. Oh, and he's bitter because a new highway that was built rerouted most drivers away from his business. Um, did my film get switched with the House of Wax remake when I wasn't looking?
Anyway, Slausen freaks them out by showing them that his figures are animatronic. At the push of a button, a figure springs up, aims a rifle at the visitors, and fires a blank at them. Slausen laughs when they get scared, and tells them that he used to love to freak out children with the robotic figures. Okaaaay......
One of the girls notices a house nearby, and asks if Slausen lives there. He mentions that someone named Davey used to live in the house, but Slausen actually lives in the museum itself. And none of his guests find that odd? Yeah, right.
Slausen tells the girls that he and Jerry will fix the jeep, and asks them to "guard" the museum until they return. Before they go, Slausen also tells the girls that the phone doesn't work. Heh, can you imagine what would happen to a group of teens today if their 90 gazillion Iphones and wireless tablets didn't work in the same scenario? You'd have about a 20-minute slasher flick, because they wouldn't be able to cope!
The second that the 2 guys exit the museum, Eileen announces that she plans to head to the isolated, spooky house in the distance, to see if they have a working phone. The other girls try to talk her out of it, but she's determined to find a phone. She tells her friends to form a posse if she doesn't return in 10 minutes.
It's incredibly dark outside, but Eileen makes her way to the house in one piece. She hears a voice inside, and calls out. When no one responds, Eileen finds the front door unlocked, and boldly walks right in.
She sees an elderly man with his back to her, and an elderly woman in a rocking chair. She steps into the room to speak to them, before realizing that they're both mannequins. She calls out to Woody, and tries the next room. More mannequins. Eileen spots a mirror and adjusts a red scarfl that she's wearing, then sees someone come into the room behind her. The mirror breaks, and she screams.
The masked figure seems to have telekinesis, and makes all of the windows slam shut just by looking at them. Then he does the same thing to the doors, and slides a chair at Eileen's legs without touching it. The masked killer makes Eileen's own scarf strangle her, and she preumably dies.
Becky and Molly get worried when Eileen doesn't return, and then they hear something moving around outside. It's only Mr. Slausen, who apologizes for scaring them. He pops open a can of soda, then begins to tell the girls about his late wife. The story comes to a screeching halt though, when Slausen realizes that Eileen is no longer in the room. He gets upset, and stomps away to find her.
Slausen heads directly to the nearby house. He calls out to "Davey", but no one responds, so Slausen decides to have a look around, He finds Eileen almost immediately, turned into a mannequin, but wearing the same clothes as before.
Back at the wax museum, Molly and Becky are starting to get restless. Molly finds a photo album, and sees some pictures of Slausen and another person(probably his brother). Then Molly finds a photo of Slausen's wife, and she bears a striking resemblance to one of the nearby mannequins. Uh oh....
Slausen interrupts them, and tells the pair that he made the figure to keep the memory of his wife alive. Then he announces that he's going to where they left the jeep, to see if maybe Eileen decided to head there for whatever reason.
Once again, as soon as Slausen exits the museum, the 2 girls also decide to leave. Instead of following Slausen, they head directly for the mysterious house. An upstairs window is lit up, and they guess that Eileen and Woody are probably fooling around in the house. Becky decides to go in, but Molly gets cold feet and declines the offer to go with her friend.
Becky climbs up to a second floor window, leaving the other girl shivering outside by herself. Becky can't see her own hand in front of her face in the dark house, so she turns on a flashlight. She tries to get Eileen to give away her location by speaking to her directly, but no one replies. The white-masked killer shows up in the background though, ready to claim another victim.
As Becky creeps down the hallway, the killer follows from a short distance behind her. Becky opens a bedroom door, and sees another mannequin, wearing Eileen's clothing. She comes up behind the figure, and sees that it's a wax figure, but then it lunges at her.
Frightened by the sudden movement, Becky btries to escape back to the hallway, but the killer then attacks her. Just as it happened earlier, all of the doors and windows slam shut, and the killer pushes Becky to the floor. She knocks him out with a mannequin body part, and crawls away, only to be buried as an avalanche of mannequins topple on top of her.
When she wakes up, Becky finds herself tied up along with Jerry. Also, there's a girl named Tina strapped down on a table. It looks like the basement of the house, so that must be where the killer "creates" the mannequins. Now, who the heck is Tina, and why is she tied to a table???
The killer tells Tina that he brought the others down to visit her, and she begs for her life. What follows is almost directly ripped-off in the movie House of Wax. Seriously, the makers of that film obviously saw this one.
Jerry tells the girls that the killer behind the mask is Slausen's psychotic brother, Davey. Then Tina chimes in, and informs them that he abducted her when she drove into his station to get some gas. She also tells them that they can't escape, and that they'll all end up dead soon. Well, Tina sure seems like a ray of sunshine, huh?
Anyway, that wasn't the part House of Wax cribbed from(well, kind of, but something else happens that...oh, you'll see!)....I guess it comes up later. Anyway, we go back to the museum, where Molly is getting restless. Nothing happens to her, andf we see the killer changing his costume. Then he returns to the captives in the basement, and tries to force them all to drink something he poured into a cup.
Okay, here's the scene I thought happened earlier. The killer immobilizes Ttina's head with a strap, Then, while Tina begins to sob, he applies plaster to her face. He describes the process to Tina as he covers up various parts of her face, saving her nose for last. As her air is cut off, he tells her that her heart will burst before she suffocates. Then she has a few body spasms, and dies. (more or less the same thing that happened to Jared Padalecki in House of Wax....except that his death was a more prolonged one)
As the killer admires his handiwork, Jerry breaks free and jumps at him. They wrestle briefly, but the killer throws Jerry off of him with superhuman strength. Jerry hits a wall, and is dazed long enough for the killer to strangle him to death.
Back in the museum, the supposedly-broken phone rings. Molly answers it, but no one responds. She grabs yet another flashlight, and leaves the museum. After she exits the building, the display holding the figure of Slausen's wife suddenly turns on.
In the basement of the house, the masked killer keeps droning on and on about his motives and his brother. Someone should tell Hollywood that the killers are 100% scarier when they shut up...While the killer drones on and on and on, the captives spot a key on the floor and try to grab it. The killer is just toying with them though, and he uses his telekinetic ability to slide it around the floor while taunting them.
Out in the fog, Molly gets scared when she hears someone near her whispering. The killer leaps up from behind a nearby bush, and shoves a mannequin head near Molly. The head has a hinged mouth and screams, which sends the poor girl off and running. The killer follows, but at almost a leisurely pace.
Molly is stopped by a tall metal fence, so she quickly scrambles over it. The killer throws the mannequin head over the fence in her direction. Where it lands, it turns toward her and starts to move again on its own. Molly travels down a stream and then through some more forest.
Eventually, she finds a road, and sees a truck coming around a bend. She flags it down, and finds Slausen behind the wheel. As she freaks out, he starts to drive. She tells him that the killer needs to be stopped, but Slausen reveals that he wants to capture his brother himself, because he thinks that he can reason with him. Molly sure is dumb.
At the house, Slausen gives Molly a shotgun. He shows her how to use it, then goes inside. When she calls his name and he fails to respond, Molly has a panic attack. She continues to shout his name, unaware that the masked killer has emerged from behind the truck. Molly hears him at the last second, and turns, pointing the rifle right at the killer.
Molly fires the gun, and finds that it's filled with blanks. As the killer teases her, she swings the gun like a club, smacking him in the face. The plaster crumbles, revealing that the killer is....Mr. Slausen! Rut roh! Molly drops the rifle, and escapes into the woods. She decides to hide someplace that is completely exposed, which is about as stupid as a stupid plan can be. Why am I not surprised?
She thinks that she sees him coming at her from the woods, so she does something else stupid: she wades into the lake/pond/whatever, and just stands there like Queen Doofus of the Doofus Brigade. Slausen somehow manages to pop up from the water behind Molly without her hearing him, and by the time she sees him, he manages to shove her under the water with a minimum of effort.
Jerry and Becky try to break free While Slausen has a "meal" with one of the wax figures. He puts another mask on, and the figure across the table sits up. Using a combination of telekinesis and ventriloquism, Slausen and his "date" have tea and crackers...until the mannequin's head rolls off.
In the upstairs bedroom, Molly wakes up in bed. Wait, so Slausen didn't drown her? Why??? She tries to sit up, but is strapped down like Tina was in the basement. Slausen enters the room, and tells Molly that if she behaves, he'll reward her. When she begs him to let her go, he tells her that he can't.
In the basement, Jerry finally gets free. He sets Becky loose also, then they sneak back upstairs. They emerge into a mannequin storeroom, and Slausen is seen nearby playing with his dolls, while dressed as a woman. Can this movie possibly get any weirder?
Slausen hears them moving around, and leaves his "dolls" to investigate. Jerry backs up and tries to act like a dummy, which comes to him naturally. Slausen looks in both directions of the hall, then leaves. Jerry relaxes and continues on his way, followed by Becky.
Jerry tries a few doors, then Slausen emerges from a room nearby, and scares the willies out of the guy. Taking no chances, Jerry simply leaps out of the nearest window. Slausen finds him brushing off broken glass and splintered wood, and they end up having a chase sequence anyway.
Then we see Becky running around in the woods, being chased by nobody. Makes sense. Instead of hiding in the trees(or behind one, at least), she finds a path lit by lamps and stops there. Wait, is the plot twist maybe that they want to get killed? It sure does seem that way...
Anyway, she's found by Slausen, who puts on the whole "nice guy" act again. He picks her up off of the ground, and carries her back to the museum, like a monster from a movie in the 1930's. He puts her on his bed, then tells Becky that he needs his "doctoring kit".
She does what they all have done so far...she waits a few seconds, gets all worked up, then starts to call out his name. Using his ventriloquism, Slausen starts with his usual errie whispering from different areas of the room. Been there, done that. Got any new tricks?
Well, it turns out that he does have a new trick! He waits for Becky to reach a certain spot, then he makes one of the wax figures pop up in front of her. When she screams he laughs, and Becky sees him aqcross the room, sitting comfortably and watching her.
Before she can react, more mannequins pop up, and begin firing real bullets at the poor girl. Becky ducks and covers, and manages to avoid the gunfire. Not to be defeated, Slausen makes a figure of a stereotypical American Indian throw a hatchet at her. The first one misses, but the second one plants itself squarely in the back of her skull, killing Becky. It takes her a week to die, though, as she "emotes" and reaches for the weapon's handle, then slides to the floor. Bravo, Shatner. One by one, Slausen uses his "powers" to turn off all of the wax figure display lights.
Molly wakes up again, and a kind-looking woman next to the bed gives her something to drink and dabs her forehead. Then the woman backs away, and Slausen enters the bedroom. Molly feigns being asleep, and Slausen lifts her out of the bed and carries her down the hall. So I guess the woman was either part of a dream sequence, or maybe another wax figure?
Slausen brings her to his play area, where they are surrounded by mannequins. Then Slausen pretends to be napping, to see what Molly will do. As you probably expected, Molly drops the act, looks around cautiously, then tries to crawl away from the loon as slowly as she can. That's when the various figures in the room have their hinged jaws go slack, and they "sing". This movie is like a one-trick pony, minus a trick.
When Molly screams and covers her head with both arms, Slausen decides to stop goofing around. He drags her to his brother's room, and tells her that she's "special" to him. He asks her to tell him that she loves him, and Molly complies. then Slausen backs away from her, and admits that he murdered his family members too. DUH. He found his wife in bed with his brother, and decided that a divorce was too messy, I guess.
Supposedly, he decided to make a wax figure of her AFTER he committed the murders, but I'm not convinced that he didn't just do to her what he did to Tina and the others. Some sappy music plays, as if we're supposed to feel sorry for the nut. Yeah, that'll happen.
After telling his tale, Slausen tells Molly that she'll have to join the others. Right on cue, Jerry comes to the rescue. Molly calls his name, and Jerry finally gets the door open. He tells Molly to come with him, and Slausen seems to hang back, to see what she does next. Molly creeps toward Jerry, then gets behind him, and hugs him around the waist.
Jerry demands to know what Slausen did with the rest of their friends, and Slausen plays dumb. I guess Jerry has a major gap in his short-term memory. Slausen laughs while Molly urges him to shoot the maniac. Remember when I said earlier that the movie had become as bizarre as it could? Well, prepare to watch me eat my words....
Slausen laughs at the idea of Jerry harming him, then tears the dumbfounded guy's arm off. Then he rips off Jerry's head, and knocks the mannequin over, to the horror of a shocked Molly. Slausen tells her to look around, and she discovers that her friends are all mannequins, yet alive too.
Slausen then dances with one of them, and she seems to be alive as well. Then a bunch of "scary" mannequins come forward, laughing, so Molly grabs an axe. As all of the mannequins to a hinge-jaw scream, she buries the weapon in Slausen's shoulder, near his neck.
He staggers around, trying to pull the blade out. Then he keels over, and Molly lets out an ear-piercing wail of anguish. A final scene shows Molly speeding away in the jeep, with the mannequins of her friends in the vehicle with her. Oh, and she's grinning like this was the best summer vacation EVER. THE END
Wow, what a seriously nutty movie. And there were absolutely no answers to anything that we saw happen--or, indeed, if it even did happen! All I can say for sure is, I'm fairly certain that the folks who made the House of Wax remake were influenced by at least some parts of this movie.
And what did I learn after watching Tourist Trap?
-Well, if you run away from a deranged killer, don't stop to admire the wide open scenery. Dumbasses.
-When choosing your friends, try not to pick ones that are anything other than flesh and blood...
-Blank rounds and bullets can transform into each other like magic, and no explanation is ever needed.
Okay, so if last week's movie finally arrives, I'll be watching Maniac Cop by mid-week. If not, I'm not really sure what I'll watch next. We'll just have to see...
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