Sorry for the delay in posts - it was a longggg week at work and I got home every day just zonked out of my mind. You wouldn't want to read what those posts would look like. It would be something demented and stream of consciousness like:
"Slaughter High is is is a school of high slaughters hahaha school of school guy apple bomb WHERE THE STUDENT BODY IS GOING TO PIECES tagline taglineeeeeeeeeeeeee,"
the final burst of Es being where my face hit the keyboard and continued the word for me. Like I said, no good at all. So I waited and now I'm bringing the good stuff. Two horror films from the mid '80s, one atrocious and one firmly in the so-good-it's-bad category.
Dolls (1987) is the crap here. Despite the fancy MGM dvd cover, and the Stuart Gordon (Re-Animator) pedigree, it's no good to anybody. The plot is so tired: spooky house, two sets of strangers get trapped there on a stormy night, house has evil secret, one by one the strangers start dying until two of them team up, evil secret is revealed, our heroes escape. Yawn, right? I remember seeing this same plot in the Agatha Christie-derived And Then There Were None ... back in 1945! And how much do you want to bet that audience yawned and complained it was a rip-off of some movie from the 1910s?
Here, the "twist" is that the house is owned by an elderly couple who makes dolls. Evil, evil, living dolls. SPOILER ALERT: The dolls are former visitors who have been transformed, via horrible special effects, into grotesque doll versions of themselves. It's similar to the 1979 horror travesty (sadly featuring Chuck Connors) Tourist Trap. Don't watch that. Don't watch this either.
I had high hopes because it was by director Stuart Gordon, who directed the camp/kitsch masterpiece Re-Animator, an adaption of H. P. Lovecraft's classic short story Herbert West, Reanimator. I will delightedly cover that movie pretty soon - it's fun and crazy. But this one doesn't have that same campy charm.
No, this movie has NO charm. The main characters are a little girl and a weird man-boy who is supposedly a child at heart, but looks a lot like an adult Sean Astin. They bond because they see the joy and life in the dolls; all the other houseguests are horrified or indifferent and thus slaughtered ruthlessly by little murderous cretinous dolls.
If any of you readers are getting deja vu, it's probably because the '80s were chock full of "little evil creatures" movies, like Ghoulies, Gremlins, and, closest to this one, Puppet Master. Puppet Master actually came out two years later, but does everything right that this movie does wrong. Most importantly: the puppets/dolls. Here, they are all lightly scary, but instantly forgettable. In Puppet Master there is a small cadre of evil puppets you grow to know and almost kind of like. Plus, that famous Puppet Master theme music:
Creepiest carnival-style music you've ever heard. Dolls has nothing to compete with that nightmare fuel.
So Dolls is a big loss, but what about Slaughter High (1986)? The same personality-less high-concept low-execution dreck?
No! It's ... "good"! Well, it's terrible, but it descends so far down the terrible scale that it's great. Here is the general plot. There is a high school way out in the country. Is it a boarding school? A private school? Just the smallest public high school in the United States? Unknown, it's never explained. All we know is that is WAY WAY out in the country (takes like a day to drive to, later in the movie) and it only has about 20 students.
One of these students is Marty, who is the quintessential eager nerd. He is happy to get along with everyone, if he can. But alas, the remainder of the student body seems to be jocks and jockettes who are in their early 30s (they must have failed A LOT) whose sole delight is crafting elaborate pranks to torture Marty. The entire (lengthy) first sequence of the movie is a very complex set up where Marty is promised sex with the most popular girl if he'll undress and meet her in the locker room.
You might think you know where this is headed, but you'd be wrong. It's actually much, much worse. They not only embarrass poor Marty, then physically torture him as if he was a POW. They electrocute him, prod him with sharp things, waterboard him, it's unbelievable. And when the gym coach breaks it up, his cavalier attitude is stunning. "Eh, you kids, what did I tell you, now you're really, eh, meh, in trouble, blah."
Yet Marty is still fairly chipper after this, incredibly. At least until the worst prank of all time goes awry right in his face:
Yeah, I know. I know. It has to be seen to be believed.
After this, the first half of the movie ends. The second half picks up years later, when all the bullies (which is everyone, remember, except Marty) receive reunion invitations. They drive FOREVER to get to their old school (again, where in hell IS that place? The top of a mountain in the wilds of Maine??) and after chugging beers and acting brain dead, they realize that there is no reunion - someone has set them up. Are they particularly worried? No, not really. They decide to explore their creepy, abandoned old school and get VICIOUSLY murdered one by one, until a (not so) surprising twist ending.
Par for the course for '80s revenge slasher films. The gore in this movie is really well done - it's surprising, realistic, and super bloody. The effects team of John Humphries, Pete Litton, and Robert Turner deserve some real praise. It kept me watching an otherwise standard-fare movie.
The movie also has a great poster, seen above. The skeleton with the giant grin and aviator shades! The apple bomb! The crazy outfit! What's not to love? The movie was directed by three directors, according to IMDB (!!!). That usually means one or more was fired and the remaining one(s) took over. I have no idea what happened here, but one of is the special effects guy Pete Litton named above, the other two I've never heard of, although one - Mark Ezra - apparently is British and has three cousins in the House of Lords, according to IMDB trivia. You don't say.
Unfortunately, a sad anecdote must end this review. The actor who played Marty, Simon Scuddamore, committed suicide just after this movie was released. It's too bad, as he is easily the most likable actor in the movie and you actually care about him, especially in the horrific opening sequence mentioned before. Poor Marty.
No comments:
Post a Comment