Pete addresses the hypothetical question: can a formula 80s slasher movie be weird, with the right twist? Forget Michael Myers, your new worst nightmare is a ten-year-old!
Tag Archives: Slasher
![Bloody Birthday [Blu-ray]](https://i0.wp.com/m.media-amazon.com/images/I/51HNKetAZ0L._SL500_.jpg?w=474&ssl=1)
IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: CHARLY, DIAS DE SANGRE (1990)
AKA Charly, Days of Blood
366 Weird Movies may earn commissions from purchases made through product links.
DIRECTED BY: Carlos Galettini
FEATURING: Fabiàn Gianola, Julieta Melogno, Norman Briski, Adrian Suár, María Pía, Martín Guerrero, Pilar Masciocchi
PLOT: Charly, a troubled young man with a dark past, is invited along on an outing to a remote cottage, but malevolent forces and Charly’s personal demons disrupt the relaxation, romance, and recuperation.
COMMENTS: There’s a lot of power in the low-budget, shot-on-video feature film. It may be true that everyone has a story in them, but it’s a select few of us who have the determination to do whatever is necessary to bring that tale to life. There’s something admirable about the commitment to making something, even without the benefit of film school training or fancy cameras or even an actual story. Of course, there’s a reason that everyone doesn’t make movies, and the truth is that some of us just aren’t meant to be behind the camera, or in some cases anywhere within a country mile of the camera. For every hidden gem, there are any number of duds best forgotten.
Today’s example of the form takes us to Argentina, where director Carlos Galettini was able to assemble three of the most important elements for any would-be auteur: working video cameras, a space in which to film, and several actresses who were willing to work nude. If the goal is to get a film made, then the bar is cleared. It’s the hoping for much more where things get disappointing.
Charly, Dias de Sangre is the living embodiment of “derivative.” Set aside the fundamental plot of “occupants of vacation home are methodically stalked and murdered.” That’s just basic slasher horror. But it’s the details that really fail to distinguish it from the competition. There’s a dark hooded figure with a scythe stalking the grounds who looks like everyone’s stereotypical vision of Death. Hector Magni’s synthy score brings the expected amount of excessive drama, punctuated by hyperactive tom samples. Even the key art is lovingly ripped off from Nightmare on Elm Street 2. Charly has all the trappings of a fan film, but borrowing more of a vibe than a specific IP.
For a while, the movie plays a waiting game, content to cultivate a sense of unease while making space for some barely clothed canoodling. All the while, our hero alternates between moping around the house in a depressed funk and spasming in his sleep as his nightmares assault him. But in the final act, when the truth about Charly’s dark past is revealed and the murders begin in earnest, the film surrenders any cleverness that it may have had. The soon-to-be victims act in the clumsiest ways possible, the killings are not particularly artful, and everything seems predicated on a last-second twist in which the authorities target the wrong person. It’s frankly impatient, as if the filmmakers themselves are in a rush to get to the stuff that brought us here.
As mentioned, any movie that gets made is a miracle. But being a miracle doesn’t make Charly, Dias de Sangre good, or even weird. Without ambition beyond it’s desire to simply be, it turns out to be a rather bloodless affair.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
(This movie was nominated for review by Wormhead. Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)
CAPSULE: TOURIST TRAP (1979)
DIRECTED BY: David Schmoeller
FEATURING: Chuck Connors, Jocelyn Jones, Jon Van Ness, Tanya Roberts
PLOT: A group of teenagers have car trouble in the back country and find themselves stuck at a closed museum exhibiting creepy, realistic mannequins.
WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: Though it be an excellent cult horror classic, this one ranks in the bottom half when it comes to real weirdness. If 2013’s Evil Dead or 2012’s The Cabin In The Woods don’t make the list, what chance does Tourist Trap have? While it’s a memorable horror film, Freddy Kruger picks weirder things out of his teeth.
COMMENTS: Weird movie fans approaching Tourist Trap will have reason to get their hopes up when they see the director, David Schmoeller. He also directed Crawlspace (1986), which is one of the better examples of a cult horror classic and a decidedly offbeat production. And nothing says “you came to the right movie” like the opening music theme, which is a perfect blend of whimsy and dread. Soon we will encounter the ISO standard horror cliches: carloads of young folks, a flat tire, the creepy old rest stop in the middle of nowhere, and the first sacrificial lamb killed off in a sentient room full of laughing mannequins. Ten minutes in, you’ll swear you’re watching an Evil Dead installment, until you remember this was done two years before Sam Raimi and Bruce Campbell first ventured into the Tennessee woods. However, by the halfway mark, after you’ve gotten a better map of this film’s universe, there will be no doubt in your mind that Crawlspace’s director made this. Unique villains are David Schmoeller’s forte.
So a carload of teenagers on some kind of outing stumble upon the “Lost Oasis,” a museum now long closed ever since the new highway went through. Stranded with the typical horror-movie car malady, the broke-down kids soon meet Mr. Slausen (horse opera vet Chuck Connors), who runs a decrepit museum of mannequins. Slausen is chock full of exposition about this creepy place, a locale that practically begs for Scooby-Doo and Shaggy to run around stumbling into the trap doors and secret passageways. As it is, the gang of kids do a knock-out job of being dim-witted horror movie teens, insisting on going skinny dipping in muddy ponds in the middle of nowhere, or splitting off alone from the group to inspect deserted houses at night—even after they’ve been warned—because they’re just so darned curious. To the movie’s credit, once we put all the pieces together and gotten to know our antagonist, we get a whole far greater than the sum of its parts. For a low budget flick with little to work with beyond old theater parts and department store fixtures, it wrings out every ounce of scare value from its limited arsenal.
Tourist Trap suffers from Trope Codifier syndrome, causing it not to age well even though it originated many of the characteristics we now view jadedly. We see it today as a derivative mad slasher flick, but that genre was just being born when this movie came out. The wayward teens might as well have numbers branded on their foreheads to show the order they’ll be picked off. The story is loaded with creepy atmosphere, but very thin on logic. Gosh, those mannequins sure seem life-like, as if their eyes follow you around… now you see where this is going. Tourist Trap is redeemed if you recall that it came out one year before Friday the 13th and just one year after Halloween. Dyed-in-the-wool horror/slasher fans will want to see this movie to check it off the must-see list, but weird fans will find little to hold their attention past the sheer offbeat charm of it all and the occasional hilarious one-liner. Make no mistake, you’ll at least get a shiver from the mannequins the next time you’re browsing in the department store at your local dusty, half-deserted mall, which just goes to show that Tourist Trap has done the job it set out to do.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
OTHER LINKS OF INTEREST:
This movie was made for Kindertrauma:
Crawlspace (also by David Schmoeller) review at Tenebrous Kate’s:
http://blog.tenebrouskate.com/crawlspace-1986/
LIST CANDIDATE: SLEEPAWAY CAMP (1983)
DIRECTED BY: Robert Hiltzik
FEATURING: Felissa Rose, Jonathan Tiersten, Karen Fields
PLOT: Eight years after her father and fraternal twin were killed there in a boating accident, introverted teen Angela Baker (Felissa Rose) returns to Camp Arawak alongside her protective cousin and adopted brother, Ricky (Jonathan Tiersten). Children and counselors alike bully the girl for her shyness, but those tormenters soon begin dying under bizarre circumstances. Meanwhile, Angela’s budding romance with a fellow camper awakens her dormant sexuality, and with it troubling memories of what truly happened eight years ago.
WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST: By incorporating a wistful portrayal of summer camp into the sleazy slasher mold, Sleepaway Camp offers a uniquely schizophrenic experience of a horror film. Furthermore, its plot ultimately explodes in an extremely violent and sexual metaphor of an ending, which remains controversial to this day.
COMMENTS: Riding on the coattails of Halloween and Friday the 13th, Sleepaway Camp neither invented the slasher genre nor the idea of the summer camp as a killing ground. Furthermore, Hiltzik’s film falls short of its predecessors through amateurish performances, disjointed storytelling, and deaths that are slightly more goofy than frightful. In the annals of ‘80s horror, Sleepaway Camp therefore seems less an original than a misbegotten child.
However, by combining the juvenility of his setting and main characters with the adult themes of a slasher, Hiltzik still produces a memorably off-kilter film. As visceral moments like the disfiguring of a pedophile crudely segue into mirthful scenes of camp life—such as Ricky pranking a nerd named Mozart—Sleepaway Camp embraces rather than hides its incoherence. In turn, Camp Arawak becomes an unreal place where the vulgar and innocent both exist, not in conflict, but as mismatched companions to each other. Sleepaway Camp’s lack of style thereby becomes its signature style, creating an unwieldy and dissonant tone that, in the end, perfectly reflects the troubled, divided mind of its killer.
That killer’s identity is now the stuff of legend, in a final twist that makes an already fractured story snap. Through that one last disturbing image, the film transcends its low budget and even lower quality to become a classic oddity among slasher fans. While Sleepaway Camp is not one of the best horror films out there, it continues to be one of the weirdest.
Shout! Factory’s recent “Sleepaway Camp Collector’s Edition” comes with an array of extras, two of which could qualify for a list of 366 Weird Special Features. The first is a short made by sleepawaycampmovies.com’s webmaster Jeffy Hayes starring Sleepaway Camp supporting actor Karen Fields, who murders a deadbeat dad and his girlfriend using, among other weapons, a turkey baster. The second is an uncomfortably earnest music video featuring the vocal talents of Jonathan Tiersten, the now middle-aged actor who played Ricky. As Tiersten somberly croons in an empty theater, and Fields wields a deadly curling iron in a nod to her famous role, one wonders if the two still haven’t gotten over their roles in Sleepaway Camp.
Joining those shorts are several bonuses that more directly relate to Sleepaway Camp, including an album of on-set photographs, multiple commentaries, and a 45-minute documentary about the making of the movie. Each of those extras show the person who loves Sleepaway Camp most may be its star; Felissa Rose beams nostalgically while recounting the friendships, drama, and fun she experienced during filming. Despite the presence of cameras and microphones, production stills of the teenage cast smiling in those idyllic woods and cabins suggest a summer to remember for decades to come.
CAPSULE: THE CABIN IN THE WOODS (2012)
DIRECTED BY: Drew Goddard
FEATURING: Kristen Connolly, Fran Kranz, Richard Jenkins, Bradley Whitford, Anna Hutchison, Chris Hemsworth, Jesse Williams
PLOT: Five college kids find themselves trapped inside an impossibly clichéd horror movie situation at the titular locale; if they somehow manage to survive the redneck zombies, they will still have to worry about the puppetmaster pulling the strings.
WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: The Cabin in the Woods is a brilliantly deconstructed, offbeat horror movie exercise, but even with its squiggly plotline it remains a bit too normal and mainstream for us. But if you’re a horror movie fan, Cabin is the can’t miss event of the year.
COMMENTS: You’ve seen it before. That’s the point. Five young archetypes—the virginal girl, her slutty best friend, the jock, the shy regular guy, and the anti-establishment stoner comic relief guy head out to the cabin in the woods for a weekend of fornicating and imbibing heavily while playing “truth or dare.” Instead, they get chopped up into teen sausage by some hungry revenant whose slumber they’ve disturbed. If you’ve been watching horror movies in the last twenty years, you’ve also seen plenty of films where the kids trapped in the cabin are horror movie experts who know the rules of the game (this one, for example); so, when the jock says “we should split up” and the stoner looks at him incredulously and says in disbelief, “really?,” you’ve seen that before, too. That, too, is the point.
In the self-aware horror movie subgenre The Cabin in the Woods is unique in that it doesn’t just parody slaughter flick conventions, it honors them at the same time—speculating about why it’s so crucial that the slutty girl takes off her top, why the chaste chick must outlive her, and about why the killings are so formulaic and so… ritualistic. To point out that Cabin is a genuine horror flick and not a simple parody of kill conventions isn’t to say that it isn’t as blackly comic as any horror-comedy to come down the pike in recent times. Every scare flick needs a crusty old gas station owner to act as Harbinger of Doom and give the kids an unheeded warning not to poke around at the old Miller (or wherever) place. Cabin gives us a Harbinger who’s crustier than the stuff that Freddy Krueger picks out of the corners of his eyes in the morning. And while he’s slyly amusing in his over-the-top tobacco-spitting spiel, Cabin brings him back for a hilarious pure-comedy cameo that shows how hard it is for a Harbinger to get out of character even when he’s not obliquely prophesying the death of college kids.
I laughed as much at Cabin the Woods as I did at last year’s full-bore gore-comedy outing Tucker and Dale vs. Evil; but, despite its winking jokes and metafictional flirtations, Cabin works because its postmodern conceits are side dishes, not the main course. It serves us a genuine and very rare course of scares, with real stakes for characters who are not as cardboard as they first appear. Cabin also feeds us the freaky images we go to horror movies to see. The monster design is a big draw, even though the creatures are glimpsed fairly briefly. A scene of a slut making out with a stuffed wolf’s head is icily strange and erotic, there’s the ghost of a Japanese schoolgirl flitting about the edge of the plot, and the carnage of the third act is something I can guarantee you haven’t seen on film before. Cabin‘s only caveat is that it’s aimed squarely at those who are already fans of what Joe Bob Briggs used to refer to as “Spam in a cabin” movies; if you’re not familiar with the tropes, this pop-autopsy of the genre might not win you over. But good horror films are rare, and horror films with original concepts are even rarer; when you find a movie that has both, it’s worth the trek into those dark woods to check it out.
Though helmed by co-scriptwriter Drew Goddard, who acquits himself brilliantly in his first time in the director’s chair, Cabin is most notable as part of a huge year for co-writer/co-producer Joss Whedon, who will have two hit films playing in theaters simultaneously when his comic book blockbuster The Avengers debuts next week.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY: