PSYCHO COP RETURNS (1993)

"You have the right to remain dead. 

Anything you say can and will be considered very strange…because you’re dead. 

You have the right to an attorney, but it won’t do you any good because…you’re dead." 

It’s only every so often that I get to incorporate a youth-inspired memoirness to a write-up because there are only a small handful of films that, through completely random happenstance, I saw at a very young age that catapulted me into a permanent state of adoration for the genre. There's The Return of the Living Dead, the first Halloween and one of its sequels, Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers, and, hilariously, there's Tales from the Crypt Presents: Demon Knight. If your formative years are all encompassing, then I was all too eager to absorb every weird, scary, or gooey second from these movies and the horror genre at large.

For some reason, Psycho Cop Returns (aka Psycho Cop 2) is one of them.

Glimpsed late at night on the USA Network’s B-movie showcase Up All Night, hosted by Gilbert Gottfried and/or Rhonda Shear (I don't remember which one had this particular honor), and which also presented such cinematic glories like A Nymphoid Barbarian in Dinosaur Hell, Dr. Alien, and Vampire on Bikini Beach, my young eyes feasted upon a very censored tale of a Satan-worshipping cop who zeroes in on a group of horny office workers hosting an after-hours bachelor party for one of their own, who then secure a trio of strippers and a filing cabinet of booze for a night of debauchery and having asses danced right in their faces. Officer Joe Vickers, the titular psycho cop, finds his way into the building and begins dispatching the office workers, the strippers, and whomever else might be around, all while letting off a series of puns so unbelievably stupid that Freddy Krueger immediately pressed charges.

Even in my early teens I could see that Psycho Cop Returns was poorly made, in most cases poorly acted, and certainly poorly scored. (This is one of the worst musical scores – written by two people! – I’ve heard in a horror film other than Jason Goes to Hell, and that’s saying something, because Jason Goes to Hell features probably every example of “worst I’ve ever seen,” up to but not including usage of The Blues Brothers‘ Steven Williams.) Nothing about Psycho Cop Returns is surface-admirable, but I’ll be damned if it isn't fun. And if I said I wasn’t just the tiniest bit disturbed as a tyke during the opening sequence when the psychotic cop gets into his squad car to reveal a blood-splashed interior, dismembered body parts, and satanic symbols, I’d be fibbing.

For years following the immense success of Die Hard’s debut in 1988, a slew of imitators came down the pike – some good, some not, but all sold as “Die Hard on a _____!”

Die Hard on a bus!

Die Hard on a naval warship!

Die Hard on the ice!

It became a tried and true method for making your pitch as succinct as possible while also trying to suggest your film would be at least as good as that Yuletide classic, and this lazy pitching gimmick reached across every genre aisle.

Psycho Cop Returns borrows that concept, presenting a sort of Die Hard meets Bachelor Party meets Friday the 13th: a group of office employees in a city high-rise are essentially taken hostage by a dangerous threat, who after neutralizing the only security guard, slips in unnoticed and attempts to blend in at one point to fool them. There are scenes in elevator shafts, on helicopter launch pads, a sexual tryst in an unused office. Only this time, it’s not the cop who will save the day. It’s the cop who will throw them off a building directly into a dumpster, then make a garbage joke while doing it. 

And it’s tremendous.

John Wick was here.

To those unfamiliar with the cinematic opus that is Psycho Cop Returns, the most surprising aspect would likely be the actor who takes on the murderous title role: stage name Bobby Ray Shafer, aka Robert Shafer, who might be most famously known as having played Bob Vance of Vance Refrigeration in several seasons of The Office. Schaffer, who has admitted as such since the movie's release, was hoping to parlay his predecessor, Psycho Cop, into a horror franchise all his own a la Nightmare on Elm Street – and the production house behind the first film was equally optimistic, signing Shafer to a staggering, pre-Marvel five-picture deal.

FIVE Psycho Cop movies. 

Imagine living in a world so good and just where that would've been allowed to happen.

Sadly, Psycho Cop Returns would be the second and final in the series (so far – I would totally see Old Psycho Cop tearing ass around wherever old people hang out and do illegal things). By all accounts far better than its predecessor, Psycho Cop Returns is 100% video store shelf sleaze. Not nearly soft-core porn, but pretty close, there’s a detectably slimy and greasy vibe covering every frame that adds to the film’s appeal. Also appealing, and I’m being 100% serious: the screenplay. Yes, the story is very derivative of the aforementioned Die Hard and the dozens of slasher flicks that came before it, but the screenplay by Dan Povenmire, who worked as an animator for The Simpsons, is actually well written. Not the action, mind you, but the dialogue between characters. Jokes (non-murderous ones, anyway) feel natural. The ribbing between coworkers feels genuine. The exchanges really do bring at least an attempt at everyday life, even if the characters are nothing more than half-formed archetypes: the horny guy, the nervous guy, etc. And the ending, which both spoofs and embodies the grainy Rodney King beating footage, which was a huge cultural event in 1992, it suggests that, maybe — just maybe — Psycho Cop Returns had something to say all along.

Of all the stupid undeserving horror franchises that don’t realize they’re stupid (Saw, The Purge, and so forth), it really is a shame Psycho Cop didn’t spawn more than one sequel, because at least it knew what it was, and wasn’t vying for anything more. Its only immediate competition was the more restrained, the more hyperbolic, and the more Bobby Davi-having Maniac Cop series, which petered out with its lame third entry, but it’s typically the franchises that tend to strive for higher quality and relevance that run the risk of diminishing returns. Psycho Cop wasn't worried about that. Psycho Cop wanted to have sex, kill people, and pun. It’s not exactly a difficult beat to walk, so it’s a shame this cop retired so early – he definitely wasn’t too old for this shit.

If you have only a passing, casual interest in the horror genre, then holy shit, just keep walking, because this will not be the film that converts you. Psycho Cop Returns is 100% for people who live, breathe, and bleed the genre. Every single person involved in its making knows that it’s stupid. Not a single person among them has any delusions that maybe Psycho Cop Returns is a slice of cinematic genius capering as something less. No. Psycho Cop Returns features a scene in which Officer Joe Vickers stabs someone in the eye with a pencil and then makes ten “eye” jokes about it. And that’s totally fine with me. 

THE MORTON DOWNEY JR. SHOW: SLASHER MOVIES

So-called violent movies, TV shows, and video games (and comic books and rock 'n roll songs and rap videos and...) have been vilified by puritans and alarmists for as long as those mediums have existed. Though the offending examples often cited change with the times, the same talking points and skewed "studies" are trotted out time and time again to prove a point that's tantamount to witchcraft: movie violence causes real-life violence, horror and slasher movies warp kids' minds, and blah and blah and blah.

Likely a relic to audiences today, Morton Downey Jr.* (no relation to Iron Man) is considered the pioneer of trash-talk television. The literally and figuratively big-mouthed TV personality, whose titular show was produced in my home state of New Jersey, ran from 1987 to 1989 and was a slimy portent of things to come, both in terms of sensationalizing people's worst behavior as well highlighting outrageous hard-right leaning "conservative" viewpoints. (He was a staunch anti-abortion activist who never missed a chance to impugn liberal philosophies while dabbling in occasional racism and misogyny. Sound familiar?) A precursor to The Jerry Springer Show, which somehow ran for 28 years, Morton's format presented hot-button guests with opposing views on social issues and let them claw at each other's throats, often manipulating the conversation and taking both sides at once just to spur the conflict.

The below episode, presented in its entirety, focuses on slasher films of the '70s and '80s, namely (but not exclusively) 1974's The Last House on the Left and 1977's The Hills Have Eyes. (Between those two titles being thrown on the pyre, and Morton opening the show wearing a Freddy Krueger mask, I'm sure Wes Craven was pretty proud at the time.) Notable guests include Hills actor Michael Berryman, who played mutant cannibal Pluto, and former Fangoria editor Anthony Timpone to take the "everyone needs to relax" side of the argument, but whom you won't be surprised to hear are barely given time to finish their points before they're cut off by Morton or his puritanical counterpoint guests. The episode is definitely worth watching for all kinds of reasons, especially if you're a pro-slasher type of person, but mainly because television from the '80s is kind of hilarious.

The greatest irony of the claim presented on this episode, which is the ease at which kids were able to rent R-rated horror films from local video stories (RIP) was causing them psychological harm, is that the claim is coming to you from one of the trashiest daytime shows in the history of television – one so frequently condemned that it had a hard time maintaining a steady business relationship with advertisers – which was only a single remote control click away from our apparently very impressionable children. Though slasher films, throughout their history, often showcased bloody kills and pornographic images, they were fiction – gags created by special effects artists and blocked by directors and cinematographers. When it comes to things like The Morton Downey Jr. Show, from the host to the guests to the venomous audience members, these people were real and the behavior they exhibited was often hostile, dismissive, self-righteous, profane, hateful, and demeaning. There are two scenarios here: a child watches a movie maniac kill people, so they go out and do the same, or a child watches a "real" TV show where adults scream at each other and hurl insults and thinks, "Oh, I guess this is how I should act when I'm older."

You tell me which is more likely.

*Morton Downey Jr. happens to appear in my all-time favorite Tales from the Crypt episode, "Television Terror," in which he leaves his comfort zone of being a trashy TV talk-show host...by playing a trashy TV talk-show host (on location in an allegedly haunted house).

CULT OF CHUCKY (2017)

The Child’s Play series has been one wild ride. After the classic, humorless first film, the series – like most horror franchises – devolved into your more typical slice and dice (though I unabashedly love Child’s Play 2). After exhausting its straight-up horror experience, series writer Don Mancini (who also directed the three most recent entries) served up a mini-reboot with 1998’s Bride of Chucky, directed by Freddy vs. Jason’s Ronny Yu, which allowed the series to deviate in a more knowingly comical manner. Things got meta with Seed of Chucky, which saw a Hollywood film being made about the “real” killer doll’s exploits, and once John Waters’ face melted off, and, in a gag that hasn’t aged well, Chucky ran Britney Spears’ car off a cliff, it seemed like the series had found itself in a creative corner.

Well, Mancini took the opportunity to, again, softly reboot the series with 2013’s Curse of Chucky, which dropped the broad humor, the meta winking, and everything Jennifer Tilly, steering the series back to the darker tone established by the original trilogy. It was a worthy effort, and certainly better than Child’s Play 3 and Seed of Chucky, but it wasn’t quite a return to form. Still, Chucky voice actor Brad Dourif was back, and his real-life daughter, Fiona Dourif, played the lead “final girl” and became quickly beloved by fans, so it had some positive things to offer.

Cult of Chucky serves as a direct sequel to that film, and just might be the most ridiculous and insane entry so far (and I am totally including Seed of Chucky in that – ya know, the film in which two plastic killer dolls give birth to a child doll while rapper Redman is directing a fake movie about their lives). Original Andy Barclay (Alex Vincent, making a return to the series after 28 years) is back, and he’s keeping a living Chucky doll head in his isolated cabin home for nightly torture sessions. And Jennifer Tilly is back as well, again playing Tiffany, murderous girlfriend of Charles Lee Ray (or, maybe she’s just playing Jennifer Tilly. Who knew a horror series about a killer doll could get so esoteric?).

It’s also strikingly directed. Mancini, who wrote several episodes of NBC’s short-lived Hannibal series (“I can’t believe they canceled that show,” Chucky grumbles at some point), embraced that series’ ultra-pretentious approach. Cult of Chucky is the most interesting looking film in the series – one might go as far as saying artfully directed  –  with one murder sequence in particular looking straight-up Hannibal inspired. Cult of Chucky actually looks phenomenal, and Mancini’s earlier mentioned Hannibal-inspired directing is largely to credit for that. Cult of Chucky takes place in the fanciest and most aesthetically pleasing asylum ever in cinema. It’s very white and institutional, but without being depressing, and everything is meticulously designed.

Cult of Chucky is also often very funny, mostly deriving from Chucky’s one-liners, which completely dwarf any that have come before. Dourif has been voicing this character for thirty years now and hasn’t lost his spark — not to mention gaining creative mileage from the asylum setting, a clear callback to the actor’s Academy-Award winning appearance in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. There are multiple references to this, from Juicy Fruit to Chucky outright mumbling half that film’s title in his typically profane manner. And like the previous films, the callbacks to other horror films are numerous, even including an unexpected nod to The Witch.

However, there are portions of Cult of Chucky that don’t work. Nearly all of the characters beyond Fiona are either inconsequential, irritating, or serve no purpose other than to make the loony bin loonier and eventually die bloody. The gore gags are great in concept but not in execution. Chucky looks cheap – not quite Spirit Halloween-cheap, but close. It’s appreciated that the film leans more on puppetry and practical effects than CGI, but its results are still unconvincing. The return of Alex Vincent promises something big, but after some really interesting implications are made regarding his post-Chucky psyche, his character plays out with no point whatsoever, except for setting up the inevitable next sequel – or TV series? (Although the post-credits stinger has me legit excited.) Jennifer Tilly, too, seems shoe-horned in, and with an especially off-kilter performance, as if her character’s appearance here is more about fan service, and the dispatching of one character in particular is more about tying up loose ends rather than creating drama. Lastly, Cult of Chucky alludes to a really interesting, psychologically-based new direction very early on, but what’s set up here doesn’t come to fruition by the end, resulting in a missed opportunity.

And speaking of “that end” – yeesh.

By now, Chucky is on his seventh entry and the series has gone direct to video. Budgets have been cut, and multiple concepts have been explored. And I can name several other horror franchises that became completely lifeless before their seventh entry. If Mancini is on board for Chucky 8: Your Soul, then of course I am, too. By now, Chucky has become a horror hero to audiences, almost the good guy. And you can’t keep a Good Guy down.

Chucky is back in a mostly enjoyable sequel — one that towers over the last two entries, at the very least. It explores new territory (without much explanation) and slowly ties back in earlier events from earlier films in an effort to group everyone together. Is the next Chucky sequel to come the one where they finally get it totally right? Probably not. But that probably won’t make it any less fun to watch.

CITY IN PANIC: THE BEST TORONTO-LENSED, AIDS-BASED SLASHER OF 1986

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.

FREAKY (2020)

The slasher sub-genre has been around for almost as long as the horror genre itself, with elements found as far back as 1920’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. Ever since then, crops of filmmakers have been content to do one of two things with the slasher film: present a dependable, uncomplicated tale that relies on its simplistic foundations, or concoct a clever take on the concept that spins the sub-genre on its head. Halloween (1978) and Scream (1996) are two perfect examples of this dichotomy. The first took all the slasher elements that had existed at that time and finally planted them into an environment that most audiences could relate to – suburbia – whereas Scream, which gleefully embraced its Halloween inspirations, masterfully took all the elements that had existed by that time and blessed its characters with a working knowledge of how the sub-genre worked, theoretically making them savvier in the face of danger. Following its release, Scream was foretold to be the harbinger of the slasher flick’s ultimate demise. Because a film had come along that called out the tropes and pitfalls of the sub-genre, critics said there would be no going back to standard slasher films as we knew them. Thankfully, filmmakers went back anyway (and Scream wasn’t even the first to go full meta – see 1991’s, albeit terrible, There’s Nothing Out There), and though this new generation of slasher fodder may have been savvier, they still ultimately fell victim to the same pitfalls as before. Like many of their masked villains, slasher films had proven they will never truly die, with most of their future offerings eagerly going back to their roots of simplicity and watered-down mythology. (Ironically, enter 2018’s Halloween.)

Last year’s Freaky, directed by Happy Death Day’s Christopher Landon, is the latest twist on a well-worn concept, taking both its concept and its namesake from, of all things, Disney’s family-friendly Freaky Friday films (the remake which stars, ironically, Halloween’s Jamie Lee Curtis, and which is GREAT – YEAH, I SAID IT.). Landon’s dedication to the genre is well established by now, having written most of the Paranormal Activity sequels along with another similarly quirky horror-comedy, Scouts Guide to the Apocalypse (2015); those stationary-camera haunted condo movies aside, his body of work proves he understands the workable balance between horror and comedy, with his scripts never coming down too prominently on one side versus the other. Freaky, which is brimming with homages to slasher films of old, clearly takes its cues from the aforementioned Scream and Halloween, while also throwing in some Evil Dead, The Shining, and Friday the 13^th for good measure. (Enjoy the homage to that latter title while it lasts, too, because thanks to all the lawsuits the series is currently saturated with, Freaky may very well be the final slasher flick to show you the below words on a movie screen…)

Though Freaky isn’t as innovative as something like Scream or Wes Craven’s New Nightmare, its concept is a clever one, mashing up two utterly disparate genres to create what amounts to a solid, entertaining, bloody, funny, and genuinely touching contribution to the horror-comedy sub-genre…and believe me, that ain’t easy – just ask…well, most horror-comedies. Freaky also offers just enough buyable aspects to its plot that the circumstances under which high school teen Millie (Kathryn Newton, Supernatural) and the town of Blissfield’s very own mass murderer, the Blissfield Butcher (Vince Vaughn) end up switching bodies never gets too mired in its own mythology to the point where the plot overcomplicates itself. Once the body-swap happens, Millie, as now played by Vaughn, relies on her two best friends, Nyla (the forthcoming Ghostbusters: Afterlife’s Celeste O'Connor, giving off strong Olivia Cooke vibes) and Josh (Misha Osherovich, NOS4A2) to track down the Butcher, re-swap their bodies before the switch becomes permanent, and save the town from the Butcher’s Voorhees-esque massacre. (His mask is one fresh coat of paint and few air holes away from being Jason’s hockey mask.)

By the sheer nature of the story, even though Newton does most of the killing, she’s not given the opportunity to lean into the new personality of her Butcher character as much as Vaughn has to somehow embody a teenage girl dealing with this absurd conflict. To be clear, it’s not a fault of Newton’s performance and it’s a joy to see her exact bloody revenge on all the dicks who made her high school life hell, but one “swap” was always going to be more interesting and entertaining than the other, and with that comes Vaughn’s triumph. Freaky, somehow, offers enough situations for Vaughn to sidestep the surface-level silliness of what he’s doing (and don’t get me wrong – he’s very funny, especially whenever there’s a longshot of him running like “a girl”) to present some honest emotional moments in which Millie can finally communicate, for the first time ever, the pain of losing her father and the angst of struggling to know herself to those closest to her. In those same kinds of absurd movie moments where the audience cries over Tom Hanks and Wilson becoming separated at sea or an aging Elvis slowly dying following a battle with a soul-sucking mummy at a convalescent home, Freaky generates handfuls of moments where the audience is sincerely touched by Millie’s emotional awakening even while wrapped in Vaughn’s serial killer body. (And if you’ve ever wanted to see Vaughn lock lips with a teen boy, well…) Luckily, thanks to Vaughn’s previous work in darker genre stuff, like 1998’s Psycho remake or 1999’s Clay Pigeons, he’s also able to convincingly play a deranged and sinister serial killer, saving his best and bloodiest for his final scenes. It’s the best of both worlds, and he’s never been more fun to watch.

Given that Freaky exists in a post-pronouns world, it’s not unfair to say that audiences might be expecting to drown in the film’s “wokeness” agenda, generated by its body-swapping plot, but except for subtly touching hands with the concepts of gender, gender roles, and cross-sexuality, Freaky never perches itself on a soapbox to offer any heavy messages – not because it failed to, but because that was never its mission statement. The characters weren’t designed to experience alternate perspectives based solely on their new bodies of the opposite sex – it was more so Millie could realize she didn’t have to be wearing the body of a tall imposing man to discover her inner strength, and so the Butcher could realize that prey was much easier to come by when the predator wore an unassuming form…even if it became much harder to kill. This careful balance of silliness and sincere conversation is just as finely tuned as its balance between horror and comedy, making Freaky not just a genre highlight of 2020, but one of the best horror-comedies to come down the pike in quite some time.

[Reprinted from Daily Grindhouse.]

MOVIE MOMENTS: BLOOD RAGE (1987)

"What's your favorite dinner scene in a movie?"

Blood Rage isn’t just a slasher favorite, but a yearly Thanksgiving tradition. Frankly, it’s as much a Thanksgiving movie as Die Hard is a Christmas movie, and I will fight to the death anyone who disagrees because that’s the kind of mood I’m in.

For those unaware, Blood Rage is about an amorous mother (Louise Lasser) who has a penchant for auditioning new fathers for her clingy twin sons, Todd and Terry, with the latter being a homicidal killer even at a very young age. In the film’s opening, which takes place at a drive-in theater, the two young boys fail at sleeping through their mother’s car sex and Terry loses it and carves up another theater-goer. However, the wrong son, Todd, is implicated and he spends a solid decade locked up in a mental hospital until he escapes and beelines right back to his family, who are sitting down to Thanksgiving dinner. After mom receives a call from the hospital warning her about Todd’s escape, they…decide to go ahead with hosting Thanksgiving anyway, but she asks Terry not to say anything, to which he agrees. Moments later, as they all sit back down at the table, Terry very casually says to his mother’s fiancé and their numerous other dinner guests, “Looks like you’re gonna get the chance to meet the rest of the family—my psychotic brother just escaped.”

Cut to this face:

If Blood Rage weren’t a slasher movie, it would be a sitcom. The laugh track was created for this kind of cutting comedic timing. Still, the revelation of a homicidal maniac coming to dinner is probably less awkward than enduring that uncle of yours who can’t wait to start talking politics.

[Reprinted/excerpted from Daily Grindhouse.]

TRICK (2019)

At one point, before David Gordon Green and Danny McBride helped to restore some class to the Halloween franchise with 2018’s successful rebootquel, Dimension Films had been trying to get a sequel off the ground for years—at first trying to continue Rob Zombie’s completely awful saga before going back to the original series and trying their hand at what was going to be called Halloween Returns, a direct sequel to 1981’s Halloween 2. Obviously, this didn’t happen, but a whole lot of folks were taking meetings with Dimension Films to pitch their approach. Among these filmmakers was frequent collaborators Patrick Lussier and Todd Farmer, who had directed and written, respectively, 2009’s My Bloody Valentine and 2011’s Drive Angry. Their version, pitched as Halloween 3D, would’ve followed the exploits of Zombie’s version of Laurie Strode, played by Scout Taylor Compton, as she was confined to a psychiatric hospital following the events of whatever the hell was happening in 2009’s Halloween 2. The duo seemed like such a sure thing that they had confidently told another frequent collaborator, Tom Atkins, that he would have the role of Laurie’s doctor. As we all know, this didn’t come to pass, and I have to wonder how much of their original concept for Halloween 3D was rewritten to become this year’s Halloween-set slasher, Trick. It does, after all, feature a maniac (Thom Niemann) in a Halloween costume going crazy one Halloween night and slaughtering several teenagers, only to be sent away to a hospital for the criminally insane before escaping again on—you guessed it, Halloween—to pick up where he left off. 

It also features Tom Atkins.

Naturally, we can only speculate on this. Perhaps Trick was built from the ground up to serve as a standalone movie without relying on the scraps of a previous script. Either way you look at it, Trick is a very okay movie, presenting a story that’s reasonably engaging although not altogether original. A killer’s on the loose on Halloween night and there’s a cop on his trail (“You’re the new Loomis”), played by Omar Epps, who also appeared in Lussier’s Dracula 2000  Despite Detective Mike Denver’s best efforts, the titular killer slices and dices his way through all kinds of people, from the teens who helped subdue him at the Halloween party where Patrick “Trick” Weaver went crazy all those years ago (I think because he almost had to kiss another dude) to even a member or two of Denver’s police team. And if you’re already thinking that only one plucky final-girl heroine (Kristina Reyes) can stop him, then hey—something tells me you’ve seen a slasher movie before. Maybe even Halloween!

As a slice of pure escapism, and as a throwback slasher flick that has some imaginative and gory kills to satiate your bloodlust, you can do worse than Trick. For someone like me who considers Halloween to be his favorite day of the year, I tend to be very forgiving when it comes to Halloween-set flicks that offer a palpable October/autumn environment and finds a way to tie its central conflict to Halloween in at least some minor way. I mention this because if this had been the same exact movie, but was called Kringle Kills and took place on Christmas , I’d be far less kind to it...but since the killer calls himself “Trick” and wears a jack-o-lantern mask and the last act takes place in a Halloween haunt walk-through...well, I'm a sucker and I fall for that kinda stuff. 

For most of its running time, Trick is competently made and hits all the beats you’d expect, but once the “twist” is revealed—followed by another “twist” at the very end that you can definitely see coming—your palms will end up pressed against your face not just at the pure silliness, but at the way the twist actually manages to ruin the killer’s mystique, rendering him less intimidating.  

Still, I won’t kick Trick off my yearly Halloween shelf, and it certainly has more of a chance of getting annual October play than Rob Zombie’s garbage or Halloween: Resurrection, but it’s definitely the weakest collaboration yet from Lussier and Farmer. The ending of Trick is a clear set-up for a sequel, and should that ever come to pass, here's hoping they have a firmer grasp on their concept now that the cat is out of the bag. Here’s hoping their next effort retains the uniqueness and their adherence to old school slasher formulas as essayed in their previous flicks. 

PAGANINI HORROR (1989)

Luigi Cozzi’s Paganini Horror is one of those movies that doesn’t serve much of a purpose—an Italian horror curiosity that’s neither good in general, nor bad enough to be “good.” Though it’s based on a lunatic concept—the “ghost” of long-dead Italian composer Niccolò Paganini coming back from the grave to avenge an ‘80s girl-pop band for stealing one of his last and unreleased compositions to save their fledgling new album—the movie simply doesn’t do enough with it. You might be thinking, “What more could you want?” but you’ve just answered your own question: more. Paganini Horror simply doesn’t know what to do, spending long, looong sequences with characters creeping through hallways of the crumbling estate where they’re staying while they record their new album, only intermittently killed by a masked madman dressed in old timey Halloween costume dudes. Is it truly the enraged spirit of the composer, or a member of the girls’ own party donning the garb to exact some kind of personal revenge, or is it none of the above? Being that this is Italian, just know one thing: regardless of the reveal, it won’t make a lot of sense, but the flick will be so in love with itself that it doesn’t care whether you buy it or not.

Paganini Horror actually proves to be fairly frustrating after a while being that the death scenes contain that perfect combination of gore and incompetence. In fact, the entire movie almost works as a garbage classic because of the hilarious, over the top dubbing, making the performances strange and heightened, along with the too-dramatic camerawork. (Italians love that zoom lens.) Among the cast is Daria Nicolodi, the ‘80s Italian equivalent of Adrienne Barbeau, in that she was romantically involved with a famous horror director (Dario Argento and John Carpenter, respectively), and appeared in many of her husband’s works, though it’s hard to comment on her performance, as it’s mostly overtaken by the hilarious dubbing. Sadly, the same can be said for Donald Pleasence’s very brief appearance as Mr. Pickett, which runs the gamut from appearing to be completely useless to being completely beyond belief. (Pleasence did not dub his own voice in post-production, so unfortunately it’s one less reason to ever try sitting through this mess.)

Even with a scant running time of 83 minutes, Paganini Horror feels like it’s crawling across the finish line. Among the more almost-trash-classic Italian flicks I can think of, they share one thing in common: a strong first act, a stronger third act, and a pitifully drawn out second act. Paganini Horror can’t even claim that, as after a very amusing and engaging opening act, the film remains a flatline through the very end, and not even a dummy crashing through a windshield and bursting into flames can save it.

Just after directing Paganini Horror, Cozzi directed 1989’s The Black Cat, also known as Demons 6: De Profundis, which actually has nothing to do with the Demons series, but was made to serve as an unofficial sequel to Dario Argento’s Suspiria. (Don’t ask. Fake sequels are a hallmark of Italian genre cinema.) Though it’s just as ham-fisted as Paganini Horror, it offers a better pace and a more engaging plot (being loosely based on the Edgar Allan Poe story of the same name), and I hope it proves to be a future release from any of our Italian-horror-resurrecting distributors. I was hoping for a fun, silly, and campy good time as essayed in other Italian horror flicks from this era, but Paganini Horror only proved to B flat ha ha! 

[Reprinted from Daily Grindhouse.]

HER NAME WAS PAMELA: 'FRIDAY THE 13TH' (1980) TURNS FORTY

The Friday the 13th series will always hold a special place in my heart, regardless of how dumb it became once Paramount Pictures’ eight-film reign ended and the franchise ended up with New Line Cinema. (Jason Goes to Hell is enough to cement my point, but the remake easily earned my hatred.) As a kid, and once the calendar fell on Friday the 13th, catching a mini marathon of the series on TNT, USA Network, or what was then known as the Sci-Fi Channel was always an event. I’d fire up the VCR, grab a VHS tape from the cabinet to sacrifice, and record as many entries as I could, stretching EP mode to its breaking point. Growing up with an old-school mother, the hammer often came down on the movies I rented, so I worked with what I was given, which were edited-for-content, commercial-ridden airings of the least mother-friendly horror series on the planet. 

Slasher fans seldom point to the first Friday the 13th as their favorite series entry, or even the best, which flies in the face of how these things usually go with long-running franchises: the original is almost always the favorite, and almost always the best, but with the franchise not even introducing infamous masked killer Jason Voorhees until the second entry, nor putting him in his famous hockey mask until the third, and with the overall series also going through an odd metamorphosis that saw entries vying to be murder mysteries (Friday the 13th), grindhouse sleaze (Friday the 13th: A New Beginning), gothic monster movies of the golden age (Friday the 13th: Part VI – Jason Lives), paranormal tales (Friday the 13th: Part VII – A New Blood), or self-aware dark comedies (Jason X), it’s easy to see why certain entries appeal to certain people. Overall, and even extending into the lesser heralded New Line era, the Friday the 13th series is like a Rorschach Test: if you look deep enough, you’ll find something that calls to you.

Though Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter is the most popular entry in the series (I won’t argue with that), I often feel that the 1980 original gets overshadowed and dismissed as being that weird entry where the killer is Jason’s mom instead of the marquee maniac we’d all come to love. Even with the maestro of mayhem Tom Savini in charge of the blood and guts, it doesn’t contain the same kinds of outrageous kills that the series would later feature, much like in Savini’s return to the series with The Final Chapter, or 1993’s Jason Goes To Hell, which has nothing going for it except the violence. But there are all kinds of reasons to celebrate the original, even if its own creators still admit to this day that it was a blatant rip-off of John Carpenter’s Halloween.

Friday the 13th offers an honest-to-gosh attempt at creating backstories for its characters, regardless of their superficiality. Alice (Adrienne King) has unknown and unresolved issues in California, Marcie (Jeannine Taylor) had nightmares about raining blood as a kid, Ned (Mark Nelson) is the “funny one,” etc. There’s nothing earth-shattering going on here, and except for some outward capering, their backstories come solely from dialogue and not their performances, as Halloween was so keenly able to do. But that’s okay! Post-Halloween slashers didn’t strive for much beyond a passing resemblance to real life and some nifty kill scenes, and Friday the 13th handles that with ease. Though it’s primarily known as a slasher flick today, putting yourselves into the shoes of an unknowing audience those forty years ago instead reveals a murder mystery at its core, even if clumsily handled. Halloween never played around with “who” the killer was—it’s how the flick opens—and while Friday the 13th is happy to ape Halloween’s slasher aesthetic, it’s also eager to apply a bit of Ten Little Indians, sticking a bunch of characters in an isolated spot and painting several of them as potential killers. Steve Christy (Peter Brouwer), who has a vague romantic history with Alice and seems against her leaving to return home, disappears into town just before bodies being to drop at Camp Crystal Lake, and all while driving a jeep…just like the unseen killer. Crazy Ralph (an incredible Walt Gorney) prophesizes all across town about how the camp is doomed, and how all those who stay there will “never come back again.” These red herrings aside, a cheap final act reveals the killer to be…someone who hadn’t appeared as an on-screen character until that very moment, stepping out of her jeep wearing her best church sweater: Jason’s mother (Betsy Palmer), known only then as Mrs. Voorhees. (She’d be given the name Pamela in The Final Chapter.) Though this reveal is a total cheat, in that audiences couldn’t possibly have guessed that the killer was a character they didn’t know existed (the on-screen hands of the killer throughout the flick are definitely a man’s—see  below), the machinations of the film up to that point were mired in mystery, successfully keeping the audience guessing up until that “oh…” reveal.

Sean S. Cunningham does a commendable job for someone only a handful of films into his directorial career and working in the horror genre for the first time. Prior to Friday the 13th, Cunningham had worked exclusively (and amusingly) in softcore porn and family films, with one of the latter being a Bad News Bears rip-off called Here Come the Tigers. If you’re sensing a disingenuous flair with how Cunningham produced his earlier projects, you’re not wrong, but if we’re being fair, he wasn’t doing anything then that Hollywood’s not doing now.

Cast, director, and special effects aside, the real star of Friday the 13th—and almost every entry produced by Paramount—is the musical score by longtime series composer Harry Manfredini. If there were any justice in this world, the exploitative reputation of the Friday the 13th series would be forgiven and his work would be just as celebrated as the compositions in JAWS, Halloween, Phantasm, and The Omen. During this era, low-budget filmmakers were seeking cost-cutting synthesizers, but Manfredini stuck with real-live strings, giving Friday the 13th a lush and propulsive orchestral score that, if we’re being honest, the sub-genre probably didn’t deserve. (He also scored the 1986 slasher Slaughter High, where he treads much of the same very recognizable ground.)

For the last few months, fans have whispered about the rumored Friday the 13th Complete Collection that seems to be in the works, and seems to be coming from Scream Factory, which stems from a couple series veterans getting a little too loose-lipped on social media. With the series celebrating its fortieth anniversary this year, it would've been great to see the announcement of a brand new Friday the 13th film, but with the series having been in litigation for the last couple years, for now, it seems as if Camp Crystal Lake and Jason Voorhees really are doomed. The only other nod to 40 years of Friday was Paramount’s steelbook reissue of the first film, and while its release smacks of the kind of “blood from a stone” pattern of re-releasing the same titles over and over without new content, at least the studio, once ashamed of its affiliation with the series, is acknowledging its place in cinema history and celebrating its impact on the movie-going public. 

[Reprinted from Daily Grindhouse.]

OUT FOR BLOOD

IT KILLS HER

The best and my favorite of the series.

I WARNED YOU