As someone who makes it a point
to plumb the depths of the horror genre, more specifically the slasher sub-genre,
and conclusively the slasher sub-genre of the 1980s, I am always on the lookout
for a title that vies to do something different, or at least vies to do the
same ol’ thing while utilizing a gimmick
that’s different. Your less discerning horror fan may stop at the top-tier slasher
shelf of John Carpenter’s Halloween, Bob Clark’s Black Christmas, or any of those infamous 1970s classics, having decided
that the resulting sea of imitators couldn’t possibly have merit and weren’t
worth examining. From this indifferent perspective, and at the surface level, post-classic,
1980s slashers were all the same: a masked killer that’s mythological in scope
or in some way related to the plucky heroine cuts down teenagers at an isolated
getaway. The casual horror fan has no interest in this slasher sub-genre’s
B-team, perhaps considering reasonably mainstream titles like Terror Train or April Fool’s Day to be as obscure as they wish to go, but for those
of us who want to keep diving downward, those titles become almost charming in
their broader appeal. Those slashers, competent or not, don’t strike with the
same sense of surprise. If you see enough of them, and regardless whether you
like them or not, you begin to realize that they really are kind of the same. (Try watching My Bloody Valentine and The
Prowler back to back and tell me I’m wrong.) These second-string slashers don’t
have that hook that makes them stand out from the rest, either with carefully
calibrated ingenuity or sheer dumbfuckery.
In regards to the latter, let’s
talk about 1986’s City in Panic.
If you know your histories, you
know of the VHS boom that hit during the 1980s, a time during which movie
fans could obtain copies of their favorite movies and watch them repeatedly, or
trade them with other collectors like baseball cards. Because of this boom,
filmmakers realized they had a completely new market readily available in which
they could peddle their films. No longer was their lack of access to talent, technology,
or even a modest budget going to
discourage their ability to make a movie and sell it to distributors. Cut out
the middleman, aka theatrical exhibitors, and appeal directly to the consumer
at home. This is how the shot-on-video era was born, and with it came a sea of full-screened,
standard-definition, oddball titles—and the “direct-to-video” stigma that would
follow.
A Canadian production originally
filmed under the conflictingly hilarious title “The AIDS Murders,” City in Panic’s story derives from the
real-life killings of fourteen men, all customers of the same Toronto bar
during the 1970s, all of whom were gay, but none of whom had AIDS. Written by
Andreas Blackwell (the writer’s only credit) and Peter Wilson (one of two
credits), and directed by Robert Bouvier (one of two credits—are you sensing a
theme?), City in Panic, I’m sure,
was intended to be more of a socially conscious think-piece and less of the
hysterically trashy romp of bad-taste filmmaking that it became. Director
Bouvier had apparently set out to embrace the sub-genre while deconstructing it
with a social-issues scalpel, evidenced by the opening murder sequence that
replicates the infamous shower scene from Psycho…only
this time presenting the stabbing victim as a man instead of the typically nubile
young girl the sub-genre had become accustomed to blood-sacrificing. In fact, all of City in Panic’s victims are adult men, taking a further step away
from the usual slasher fold and not killing a single teenage girl. (Gasp!) It’s
all part of Bouvier’s weird, half-baked intention to channel something like Scream but which results in something
like Scary Movie (only funny).
Bouvier didn’t stop at Psycho in terms of presenting City in Panic as some kind of self-aware
look at the genre: the flick is a Frankensteinian hybrid of Oliver Stone’s Talk Radio (about a controversial radio show host whose extreme views put
him in danger at the hands of an unstable listener), William Friedkin’s Cruising (about a serial killer picking
off homosexual men), and any typical Italian giallo in which the would-be victim stumbles ass-backwards into the
murderous conflict by working with a police detective who, for reasons
evidenced by his own techniques, definitely
shouldn’t be a detective. More specifically, City in Panic’s plot involves a mysterious giallo-styled murderer, right down to the black gloves and
high-collared trench coat, who goes by the alias “M” (inspired by Fritz Lang’s serial
killer flick from 1931), and is butchering seemingly random people who all hail
from different backgrounds, and who don’t share any obvious connection to each other.
It’s only until the investigation is underway when investigators realize the
victims do, in fact, have something in common: they had all, at some point in
their lives, contracted AIDS. “M,” it seems, is embarking on a bloody path to “protect
the city” from this bloodborne scourge, and for some reason, police captain
Barry McKee chooses longtime friend and deadbeat dad Dave Miller (David
Adamson), a hot-button radio show host, to draw the killer out of the shadows
by baiting them into calling his show so the police can trace the call.
As mentioned, and in spite of the
comical mess that it ends up being, City
in Panic was seemingly designed with good intentions, mostly as an
awareness piece about this new deadly disease called AIDS that was spreading
fast through certain communities during the 1980s, which was caused by
unprotected sex, blood transfusions, and needle drug use. Despite those three
causes, and despite both men and
women contracting the disease in different ways, AIDS became known, prominently
and unfairly, as “the gay plague.” Though it bungles its message with trashy
results, City in Panic was striving
to show that people suffering from the disease came from different lifestyles:
gay and straight men of opposite professions, along with well-put-together women,
along with…well, let’s stop there. The film attempts to examine different
people through the same unbiased lens, but it completely botches this approach by
positing the accidental takeaway that any woman with AIDS is a victim, but any
gay man—depicted as visiting bathhouses or soliciting anonymous sex—is someone
with an amoral lifestyle who brought it on himself.
Because the gay aspect overwhelms
a large part of the conversation, and because this is the 1980s, an era in
which there was no such thing as subtlety, City
in Panic is built on stereotypical looks at homosexual lifestyles and homophobic
characters way too eager to toss off the usual number of gay slurs regardless
of who may overhear. Captain McKee chides a homophobic cop who had bellowed,
“This is one case I wouldn’t mind not
solving,” by loudly reminding him, “NOT ALL PEOPLE WITH AIDS ARE MEN,” and though
that’s supposed to be a teachable moment for not just this particular
homophobic character but the audience as well, there is zero acknowledgment in the film that AIDS can be contracted through
other means beyond sexual recklessness. This is evidenced not just from the scene
where a character (who looks hilariously like Corey Feldman and Crispin Glover were
fused inside Seth Brundle’s telepod) watches a program about AIDS on television
and remarks, “This is why I’m
celibate,” but also a really heavy-handed montage where glimpses of Dave having
unprotected sex with his lady friend are intercut with Captain McKee looking at
crime scene photos of M’s AIDs-having victims.
City in Panic is peppered with so-called opportunities like these to
learn and heal, but they not only come off as uninformed preaching, they’re completely
undone by scenes like, for instance, a gay character tapping the shoe of the
guy in the next public bathroom stall and eagerly sticking his dick through a peephole
(through which he initially looks, I guess to see if it’s still a hole, which
may or may not be another Psycho reference).
Though gay men are ultimately depicted as victims of their choices, those
consequences come as the result of broadly “godless” behavior straight from the
Westboro Baptist Church playbook. City
in Panic takes the slasher flick’s typical presentation of teenagers as
hive-minded miscreants who only want to bang, do drugs, and make really questionable
choices, and applies the same kind of lazy strokes akin to SNL’s version of homosexual
culture, depicting nearly all of its gay victims as engaging in reckless sexual
behavior. The most telling aspect of how the film treats gay characters is through
its failure to assign them any redeeming qualities; their purpose is to either
badger DJ Dave with flamboyantly antagonistic behavior—that would be the
muckraking, sherry-drinking gossip columnist, who is never outed as being gay
but is clearly presented as such, in keeping with the film’s unsubtle characterizations—or
die bloodily in a bathroom stall after soliciting anonymous oral sex through a dick
hole. There is exactly one gay
character with AIDS, Tommy the bartender, who is presented as a real person and
not a walking caricature, but it’s not until after he’s been murdered that his two secrets are revealed, which
is supposed to feel like a really dumbfounding moment since his character wasn’t engaging in broadly gay behavior.
(Dave remarks, in total disbelief, that he had no idea Tommy was gay, as if he
should’ve been wearing a sign.)
To lend credit that it doesn’t
deserve, City in Panic really is trying to make a point during the
final conflict with the killer as they lay it all out on the table and reveal
why they did what they did; the scene comes so close to being the kind of genuinely
moving moment that teeters on making the audience sympathize with the killer
that City in Panic threatens to
become kind of a real movie—one that presents life as messy and impossible to
categorize—until you remember the preceding 85 minutes and laugh all over
again. By then, the damage has been quite done, leaving City in Panic so void of subtext that
its intended conversation about AIDS has no value except for its potential for
a drinking game: take a shot every time someone says the word “AIDS,” and take
two whenever someone very unnaturally
inserts the topic of AIDS into everyday conversation. You’ll be drunk before
Dave takes a call from some concerned Canadian listener who thinks wishy-washer
liberals need to shut up about mental illness because this killer clearly must
be some kind of freak! (It’s all made additionally amusing by the fact that
this is a Canadian production, which means there are flagrant uses of “aboot”
and “hoose.”)
It feels wrong to say that City in Panic’s value comes from an
ironic sense of entertainment, being that it struggles to tackle a major health
crisis that was tearing apart communities and instilling a real sense of fear
in the general public during the 1980s, but why
its makers felt the slasher sub-genre was the best medium through which to
convey that message remains a baffling choice, and is handled with all the care
of any Three Stooges short where the
trio play delivery men constantly dropping shit down the stairs. Bouvier even tries
to suggest the slasher sub-genre itself
is to blame for all of society’s ills, and this isn’t speculation, but comes as
a rational takeaway from Dave’s asking a psychologist guest on his radio show,
“Are the people who make slasher films responsible?” And I guess Bouvier
doesn’t quite want to throw this
against the wall exclusively to see if it sticks, because the psychologist
responds by saying all of society is
to blame for M’s killings…without ever explaining what that means. (I also feel
compelled to point out, since City in
Panic is knowingly deconstructing Psycho
as part of its plot, that Psycho 4: The
Beginning would come about four years later and also lean heavily on a
radio call-in show trying to lure and defeat a serial killer, as well as a psychologist
guest host who muses about serial killers, as its plot devices.)
It’s not impossible to make a
gay-themed slasher flick that actually has relatable, believable characters who
just so happen to be gay—see 2004’s Hellbent
for an example on how to do this—but you won’t find any of that in City in Panic. Nor will you find
substance, maturity, or understanding of what it is Bouvier and co. were
actually making, as evidenced by the below and very real exchange from the film’s
denouement:
“How could you kill innocent people?”
“THEY HAVE AIDS!”
“You can’t go around killing people just because they have AIDS!”
If you’re a connoisseur of trash cinema and you don’t mind finding some conflicted laughs in a film trying to be socially conscious but failing miserably, spend some time in this City in Panic. Just…stay out of the men’s room.
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