DVD: NEEDLE (2010) -7 DAYS OF HORROR, DAY 5

 

I bought this on the basis of a new good reviews on Amazon. They were wrong.

The supernatural premise is basically a macguffin. There's this magic box, see, and you have to insert a photo of your victim, add some drops of your blood and a somewhat larger quantity of molten wax, turn a key to start it, wait for it to whir for a few moments and then out pops a wax voodoo doll for you stab, maim, or mutilate according to taste. Congratulations! You now have the means to commit a perfect untraceable stabbing/maiming/mutilating/ murder.

So basically this is another teen slasher and thee is plenty of teen slashing. For example-

Yes, there is plenty of gore as our unseen slasher has lots of fun usually intercut with shots of the victim and shots of what's being done with the voodoo doll. However, as the killer is not in the same place as the victim there's little sense of menace and none of the one on one brutality normally associated with a slasher. 

Ah yes, the story, what little there is of it. It's set on an Australian university campus and revolves around a group of twenty year olds, one of whom receives the magic box from his dead father's estate and it get stolen almost immediately. Here they are. Can you spot the killer?

I was pretty sure I knew who did it before the killings even started. Slasher rule 1: if it's one of a group it's always the one who seems the least likely. So I sat through this not very impressive movie waiting for confirmation. Except I forgot Alternative Slasher Rule 1: if it's not the one who seems the most likely, then it's the one you never even considered because there was completely no point. Okay, okay, I got it wrong.

Not for the first time recently, I thought the 18 certificate was rather harsh. While gory, it's not brutal. The language is standard for a teen slasher. There is no titillating sex or nudity, only some brief affectionate lesbian lip-locking. 

The police and our heroes and all particularly stupid as the former never interview the latter and a little more perceptive research by the latter who have revealed the killer much sooner. But then we wouldn't have a movie. Basically it's all fairly flimsy and doesn't really have anything going for it apart from the gore.

DVD: IAN'S SLASHFEST 2009

(No photos because for some reason my right mouse button has stopped working.)

Three slasher movies in three days. Having read a variet of reviews the consensus seems to be that they are all deserving of a decent reputation. Note that I use the word consensus and not uniformity of opinion. They are looked at in viewing order.

First off is The House on Sorority Row (1983). The DVD is a cheapo  no frills, no subtitles, region 0 edition.

Plot in a nutshell: 20 years earlier baby experiments go wrong; sorority house end of year; party planned; house mistress horrible and dies when a prank goes wrong; killer kills at the their party; final girl kills him/her/it; last scene, 'dead' killer opens eyes. Very formulaic.

What I liked: generally okay but nothing worth singling out.

What I didn't like: there are no twists, not a one. Is the house mistress dead or not? Answer: dead and stays that way. Is the killer one of the girls? No. Is the killer the final girl's blind date? Can't be, too obvious, must be a red herring. He's a red herring. Is the killer anyone we've met? No. he's the house mistress's deformed locked up son. Decent gore: no, relatively tame and despite mild nudity the 18 rating is unwarranted.

Friday 13th Part VI: Jason Lives (1986).  Trailer, subtitles.

Plot in a nutshell: you mean you don't know? Okay. Idiot who killed Jason years ago digs him up to burn the body; resurrects Jason; spends rest of movie evading the police who think he's pretending to be Jason; real Jason kills lots of people at camp.

What I liked: the first part which is a horror-comedy. "I've seen too many horror movies not to know that a man in a mask is not going to be friendly," says a soon to be victim. The gravedigger on seeing Jason's dug up grave turns to the camera and says, "The things that some people consider entertainment." Jason's encounter with a group of screwy paint-ballers, where he acquires a nice shiny machete to replace the spear-like cemetery railing he'd been using, is very funny. The sight-gag of the camera panning over sleeping pre-teens clutching teddies, picture books, and one bespectacled girl with an arm over a novel by John Paul Sartre.

What I didn't like: very little, it's just the rest is the usual unimaginative stalk and slash. Sometimes something like an unexpected severed head will raise the game a little but otherwise it's nothing you haven't seen before. The worst thing is a room lacking a body but absolutely drenched in blood leaving you to shudder at what might have happened there. Most of the killing is done in a cut-away shot which reduces the impact.

The Burning (1981). No frills DVD, no subs.

Plot in nutshell: Hideously scarred after a camp prank went wrong and finally released from hospital after five years, Cropsy heads back and begins killing the current group of campers.

What I liked about it: pretty much everything. This is it! This is what a slasher should be. The director piles on the tension, so much so that for the first in ages I was peeping nervously around the corner of a DVD case. Explicit graphic gore, but not really vilely hideous but bad enough, courtesy of Tom Savini. Good cast who portray believable varied interesting shaded characters. Kids act like kids. These aren't formula stereotypes but people you can believe in and care about. It is genuinely scary and for the first time in ages I was actually scared rather than amused by a horror film. I'd nearly forgotten what that was like. I'm keeping this one and will be watching it again.

What I didn't like about it: missing Holly Hunter. Apparently it was her first movie and I was looking out for her but never noticed her. Darn. Oh and maybe they could have shown the hideously scarred killer more than the one brief glimpse near the end.

And so ends my slasher infatuation. If they were all as good as The Burning, I'd be digging out more of this genre but they aren't and so it's back to monster horror movies (see recent posts). However before I leave you, there's this.

Addendum

Frightmare (1974, UK, dir.Pete Walker). DVD: commentary, trailers, subs.

This is part of a cheapo 4-DVD pack of British exploitation maestro director Pete Walker's early 1970's efforts. All his movies were cheaply and quickly done using good, but mostly then-minor, British actors. They boasted lurid titles -Frightmare means absolutely nothing in the context of this film. It is, however, a genuinely grim and disturbing piece of work. Released after 15 years in a mental hospital, Sheila Keith soon reverts to her homicidal cannibalistic ways, unknown to her loyal husband Rupert Davies. His daughter by a previous marriage lives in London with the couple's tearaway daughter who believes them dead. When the former's boyfriend starts investigating it builds to one of the most fucked-up vile conclusions to a movie that I've ever seen. This has more genuine emotional impact than the three previous movies put together. There is gore but it's more emotionally horrifying that anything else.

All I can say it that I hope the other three in the pack aren't this grim.

HORROR MOVIES: WHY WE LIKE THEM (alternate cut)

I've already been here once and the conclusions I came to were twofold: that we enjoy the frisson, the thrill, the moment the killer strikes, the shock as much as the violence itself, as catharsis; but also we are subconsciously confronting our deepest fear, the fear of dying, of death, and we are laughing at it, laughing in the face death, making it that much less frightening.

But I've been wondering about that and while I still hold it to be true, I've started to suspect that there might also be an uglier truth behind our love of horror movies and I'm beginning to believe that it might lie in my expanding taste in horror movies. Generally I prefer horror movies to have a monster as the threat rather than an ordinary (albeit highly resistant to damage) human -Dracula rather than Jason, things from outer space rather than evil twins, demons not the demented. Titles I can see from where I'm sitting include: The Evil Dead, Shaun of the Dead, Re-animator, Brain Dead, Zombie Strippers, Dog Soldiers, From Beyond, Demons, The Host. To have a human being as the monster brings it too close to home. I prefer my horror movie to be on the level of science fiction and fantasy. Obviously there have been exceptions but on the whole I've tender to avoid the slasher sub-genre which I've seen as a debased form of horror movie.

Until recently.

Recently I've started flirting with slasher movies. There's the Nightmare on Elm Street series, though I regard that as more fantasy horror. I really enjoyed Jason X (Friday13th in space) because of its sense of humour and the robotrix whose nipples kept dropping off and was later programmed to go mano a mano (if that's not the wrong expression) with Jason, so that despite the gore it only got a 15 rating. Obviously I highly rate the original, relatively bloodless, Halloween.

But in general I've regarded the slasher movie as a simplistic debased form of the horror movie that requires little talent or imagination. Isolate a bunch of teenagers, throw in some nudity, and have them gruesomely killed by a masked assailant. And to some extent this remains a pretty accurate description -one recent DVD I watched(courtesy of Amazon Vine was a slasher directed by George Romero's son pretty much fits the bill and was rubbish (see my Amazon review for details and boy am I glad I didn't waste any money on it).

Yet, for some reason, I've started getting some entertainment from this type of movie. It didn't begin with, but it's a good place to start, My Bloody Valentine and its 3-D remake (see a recent post on them). More recently I picked up a double bill on the Anchor Bay label of -well, here's a picture of the cover.

Checking up, The Initiation had a couple of good reviews and deservedly so. Although it ticks the usual slasher boxes -teenagers being stalked in an isolated spot (a department store at night), casual female nudity as college girls get showered and changed, the twist ending (which, annoyingly, is given away by one of the inlay's chapter titles and also by IMDB's character/cast list), it has a longish but never dull buildup to the stalking as the villain has a very good reason for doing what he/she/it does and it isn't because he/she/it likes stalking teenagers, but neither is it overly gory and generally comes under the good fun category and I'd rate it quite close to the original MBV in quality.

Mountaintop Motel Massacre, on the other hand, has a reputation as a stinker which, having watched it, I feel is a bit harsh. At the very least it deserves credit for having the killer being an unmasked 60+ psychotic woman. It's also even more of a literal slasher than the previous movie (where a couple of characters were offed by a bow and arrow) in that her weapon of choice is a rusty scythe -slash, slash. While I did speed up some of the talky bits and won't watch it again, it wasn't too bad and had a couple of good gore effects.

This is a Tobe Hooper movie from the early 80's and I remember seeing a gruesome picture of the killer on a magazine cover. Now I think the cover of this DVD is scarier. Again it ticks the usual slasher buttons: four teens spend the night in the funhouse (UK equivalent: ghost train) at a carnival, brief nudity, masked killer, gruesome deaths. Although I can't say I particularly cared for the film it did have its moments. The killer, who initially wears a Frankenstein monster costume, is retarded and in one scene pays a fortune teller, old enough to be his grandmother, for  sex which, surprise, goes drastically wrong. Not long after that he is revealed as physically deformed. Despite his homicidal rages, his father isn't exactly sweetness and light either.

I have a few others on order from Amazon Marketplace: the original Prom Night (with Jamie Lee Curtis -seen 3 & 4 on a twofer DVD, one a horror-comedy, one just plain crap), House on Sorority Row (which has had some good reviews), Friday 13th 6: Jason Lives (possibly the best of the series with sympathetic characters), and The Burning (heavily cut by UK censors at the time, but now no more) which again is supposed to be one of the better 80's slashers. Hopefully this lot will satiate my desire for slasher movies.

But what worries me is that it won't.

 

What if another reason we watch them is because they provide a sinister vicarious pleasure that we are denied in our real lives. What if it actually is the gory killing of other people which gives us the pleasure. The movie becomes a vehicle for the pent-up violence within us, within even the most humanitarian of individuals with the highest ideals -and I obviously mean myself here as well all know that to just mention that description and the person with whom you are conversing will immediately venture, "Why of course, you're talking about Ian Williams, that most noble and humanitarian of individuals."

The catharsis doesn't come with the frisson, it comes with the killing and the killer is our surrogate. The slasher movie exposes the darkness within ourselves and we revel in it, in the destruction of another human being which, in our real life, we would never seriously consciously consider doing.

On the other hand, I've never identified with Jason, psychotic grannies, homicidal twin sisters, demented miners, or sexually frustrated freaks, so maybe not.