REVIEW: SCREAMING IN HIGH HEELS: THE RISE & FALL OF THE SCREAM QUEEN

For a person to say they like horror movies is kind of a misnomer. While it’s easy to break down films into horror, action, comedy, etc., that really only scratches the surface of the multiple sub-genres and mini-divisions of each of those basic genre groups. But within the horror genre, there are so many of these aforementioned subsections that it’s easy to become lost, and even intimidated. Somewhere down this rabbit hole exist the B-horror comedy, the B-horror softcore, the B-horror exploitation, and on and on and on.

So again, when a person says, “I like horror movies,” does that automatically include stuff like Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-O-Rama, or Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers? Who knows? Probably not. But while they may have been shot in 5 days and cost $50,000, they’re still horror, through and through.

For those of us old enough to remember the mom-and-pop video stores that provided most of us horror-loving sociopaths our fixes in the ‘80s and ‘90s, these titles may sound familiar. Their cover art featured glorious cartoon cleavage, belonging to a group of blondes and brunettes cowering in terror from a monstrous thing. I personally recall wandering down row after row of gigantic VHS cases like these, transfixed by the chesty ladies right before my eyes, terrified my mother would catch me leering at the halfway-pornographic images when I should have been in the Kids section. 

Screaming in High Heels: The Rise & Fall of the Scream Queen celebrates that gone-but-not-forgotten subgenre of horror: the cheap, low rent, trashy, direct-to-video movies that overflowed video store shelves during their reign. The doc begins, literally, with an ending – that of the heyday of drive-in theaters – and explained the tactic behind their programming, something I’d previously not known and found incredibly interesting. Many drive-in theaters would show not one but two films in order to appeal to the entire family unit. The first, the A picture, was the one with more appeal, and the more family-friendly tone. But somewhere during that A picture, the kids would fall asleep, leaving the parents alone with the B picture, featuring the types of films celebrated in High Heels. The films were fun and titillating, and because they were cheap to produce, they should have made an instant profit. But because of the questionable investors and release companies involved with these types of films, the filmmakers hardly ever saw such profit.

But that all changed once drive-ins became a thing of the past, and filmmakers realized they could make films directly for video stores, and with moderate publicity, rake in the profits.

For fans of the cheapest, most low-rent horror films that could be found in said video stories, Screaming in High Heels: The Rise & Fall of the Scream Queen is an endlessly fascinating piece of entertainment. While the skeleton of the doc is centered around the three scream queens of the ‘80s – Linnea Quigley (The Return of the Living Dead), Brinke Stevens (The Slumber Party Massacre), and Michelle Baur (The Tomb) – the doc really covers the genre in which these ladies worked and prospered. Featuring additional interviews with known trash-makers Fred Olen Ray (Jack-O, Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers) and David DeCouteau (The Tomb, Puppet Master 3), this unheralded and looked-down-on subgenre is explored and discussed with great, but not at all deluded, admiration. The filmmakers and actors interviewed know they were making trash, but there is not a detected ounce of shame in regards to their films, which they recollect with fondness. Nor should there be, really.

This is Fred Olen Ray.
He directed Alien Dead.
He says, "you're welcome."

The doc makes great and clever use of hundreds of clips from films being discussed, not just as reference material, but to fill in the on-screen gaps and keep the study moving forward. Even as the interviewees explain the video store era, or recall specific anecdotes, appropriate scenes from these cheapie movies are spliced into the doc to complement the information we're being provided. It was a clever tactic and one I appreciated. The quality of sources from which the doc's film clips are grabbed range from crisp to 37th generation VHS. Personally, the first time I saw The Slumber Party Massacre was courtesy of a previously viewed VHS with hundreds of miles already on it, so the degradation of the film clips weren't a distraction at all, but rather strangely appropriate and indicative of the many films like it that I watched in my youth.

Our ladies start at their beginnings—with their upbringings, their exposure to the biz, and their highs and lows affiliated with their careers. They speak candidly about being comfortable with their bodies (though Quigley shocking admits to having been been very shy and self-conscious about her body during her youth) and how they had eventually become known for doing such movies. In the same way Schwarzenegger and Stallone became the default choice for action films during the late '80s/early '90s, these ladies, too, had soon become the default choice when a film needed a lead character to have a little fun, get a little dirty, and kick a little ass.

I was interested enough to sit down with this doc and give it a watch, being that I love watching documentaries based around horror movies, but admittedly I was a little concerned that I wouldn’t be able to fully appreciate High Heels’ focus. I consider myself pretty well-versed in the horror genre, but I’ve only seen a handful of films featuring Linnea, one with Brinke, and hadn’t even heard of Michelle. Despite that, High Heels proved an immeasurely interesting watch, as it covered not just their careers, but the subgenre for which they skyrocketed to B-movie stardom. Not only that, but I came away looking at all three ladies in a different light; they were no longer just “those girls” who took off their clothes for whatever array of films in which they appeared, because in High Heels they had been humanized, explored, and celebrated in a way that most people never would have even considered doing.

Hats off to director Jason Paul Collum for this little endeavor. While a few more talking heads to fill out his cast of interviewees would have been nice (where the hell was Jim Wynorski?), those who did sit down and discuss their careers more than made up for the absences.

Strap on some High Heels, people. It's a hell of a lot of fun.

SHITTY FLICKS: SORORITY HOUSE MASSACRE 2

Shitty Flicks is an ongoing column that celebrates the most hilariously incompetent, amusingly pedestrian, and mind-bogglingly stupid movies ever made by people with a bit of money, some prior porn-directing experience, and no clue whatsoever. It is here you will find unrestrained joy in movies meant to terrify and thrill, but instead poke at your funny bone with their weird, mutant camp-girl penis.

WARNING: I tend to give away major plot points and twist endings in my reviews because, whatever. Shut up.

They don’t make ‘em like this anymore.

Directed by the esteemed Jim Wynorski (Chopping Mall, The Devil Wears Nada), Sorority House Massacre 2 is filled with all the breasts, blood, and big hair that the late 80s had to offer.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: a group of raunchy teen girls settle into an old, abandoned house, despite the murderous events that took place there in the past. One by one, the girls begin to die off in painful ways. In between, there is a lot of giggling, drinking, and random undressing.

Wynorski at this point already knew what kind of movie he was making. Though this was Sorority House Massacre 2, it was, in essence, Slumber Party Massacre 5. The tropes for these films were already so set in stone that while Wynorski may have placed an obvious joke here and there, for the most part he played it very straight. It was a wise choice that adds to the movie’s charm. “We know this is bad, but we’re pretending it’s not,” etc. Additionally, while its title clearly indicates it is a direct sequel to the ho-hum Sorority House Massacre, it’s more of a ret-conned sequel to The Slumber Party Massacre. You see, footage from the last act of Slumber Party is shown, but all of its characters are redefined not as high school friends and their random basketball coach, but rather two teen sisters and their mother—all of whom are inexplicably murdered by their father/husband, Clive Hockstatter (the first movie’s driller killer). 

I’ve seen footage from a previous film used in its sequel to fill in the gaps. 

I’ve even seen a plethora of this footage used to pad out its sequel’s running time. 

But I can honestly say I’ve never seen footage from a movie that was entirely retconned by onscreen narration. This is like making a sequel to Ferris Buehler’s Day Off, but showing footage from Batman, as someone off screen says, “And then Ferris punched the Joker off a building, and the Joker’s laughing bag laughed at Pat Hingle.”

It doesn’t matter, really. Let’s just move on and meet our girls.

Linda: She’s British and kind of a scaredy-cat, and is the closest thing we have to a final girl.

Jessica: She wears skimpy outfits, but really shouldn’t, as every inch of her could be described as plentiful. Extra skin leaks out from between her midriff top and high jean shorts. She has a boyfriend who looks like her father.

Janey: She’s hot in that Betty Page sort of way and I’m pretty sure she’s the one who causes all this trouble in the first place with that stupid Ouija Board.

Suzie: She has big hair and even bigger panties, but in general she is quite short. Watch as our characters talk down to her throughout the movie…literally!

Kimmy: Whichever girl is the last one I haven’t mentioned yet. She’s mousy and kind of forgettable. She looks like Suzie, but is taller. She may or may not exist.

"Hey boys...got any donuts for me in that van?"

The girls meet outside the house they have bought—it’s to be the new headquarters of whatever sorority they’re in.

“When are the movers coming?” someone asks.

“6 a.m. in the morning,” Jessica answers, repeating and reiterating herself.

While unpacking, they meet Orville Ketchum, their new next-door neighbor. He is the most unsightly man anyone has ever seen, and the movie goes far out of its way to make you think he is the killer. At this point, I honestly can’t say if it was purposely over the top or accidentally so, but it doesn’t matter, because either way is fine with me.

He goes on to explain that he’s been keeping an eye on the place for all the time it’s been abandoned—sort of a glorified landlord.

“So all you girls are going to be living here? Guess you’ll be needing this,” he says and reaches directly inside his pants and fumbles around his cock area. As much as I don’t want to encourage the movie, I laugh anyway.

Instead of his fat man cock, he removes a key. “For the basement,” he says, grinning.

"I'll answer it; it's probably just the pizza gu--OH MY GOD."

The minute he leaves the girls begin to undress, one at a time, and we see pretty much every pair of potential breasts—even the main girl. (Thanks Jim.) Once the clothes come off and the nighties go on, the Ouija Board makes its appearance.

“Put your fingers on the divider,” someone orders.

“No one puts their finger in MY divider,” someone says back, which is weird, because all of these girls are clearly whores.

Suddenly the Ouija Board flies across the room!

CUE BAD LIGHTNING STOCK FOOTAGE!

The girls are suitably creeped by this until someone suggests that it was static electricity. I guess they believe it, because one of the girls begins to give another a massage. (Thanks Jim.) It doesn’t last, however, as they begin to fight over a boy. The girls separate as really bad music you’d hear in a Halloween store – the one with the robotic voices impossibly changing octaves – fills the screen with trademarked terror.

Janey grabs a bottle of tequila, sucks on the spout, and is then killed by a sloth hook. And in the lower right hand corner of the screen, check out the obvious hand that squeezes a bottle of fake blood all over the wall. (Thanks Jim.)

CUE BAD LIGHTNING STOCK FOOTAGE!

The girls split up to try to find Janey within the apparent labyrinth of their new home.

Susie goes up to the attic and steps into a bear trap (?) before being sloth-hooked.

Oh no, what will happen next?

Tits, that’s what. I guess we’ve spent too much time without some tits, so we cut immediately to a strip club to take a gander at a few. Look, there’s some. Oh, there’s some more. (Thanks Jim.)

Our two cops I forgot to introduce – Lt. Block and Sgt. Shawlee – sit at a booth and literally clap after one of the dancers finishes her act, which I'm pretty sure is not usual strip club decorum. (Also, Sgt. Shawlee is a she.) As the next stripper begins her act, Lt. Block looks pleased to be exactly where he’s at.

A stripper comes over to their table and sits down. She is Candace Hockstatter, one of the sisters who survived her father’s random and denim-jacketed massacre. She tells the police that their old neighbor, Orville Ketchum, always gave the family the creeps, and she believed he had something to do with the original murders.

No time for any more exposition, though, because we’re back at the sorority house as more girls get murdered. As someone gets a metal point shoved into her person, Linda screams for way too long, most likely waiting for the prop guy to shoot a load of fake blood into her mouth.

CUE BAD LIGHTNING STOCK FOOTAGE!

“Oh my god, our clothes!” screams one of the girls. “They’re still upstairs!”

Deciding that living > clothes, the girls fling open the door and run outside just long enough to get nice and wet, making all of their clothes see-through. (Thanks Jim.) Then they see Orville Ketchum standing outside in the street, so they run back inside.

“I knew he wasn’t firing on all his cylinders!” someone shouts, not quite getting the expression right.

Susie was overjoyed to be making a film where
it was a hook touching her nose instead of testicles.

The girls run up the stairs to the attic and the camera makes it a point to linger on each of their asses as they do so. (Thanks Jim.)

Ketchum bursts into the attic and Linda stabs him for being fat, hideous, and probably the killer. She flees into the bathroom and sees one of the girls dead in the blood-filled tub. Then Orville Ketchum bursts into THAT room and she slams his head into the toilet because he is probably still the killer.

Eventually Linda finds herself in the basement with Jessica, who it turns out IS the killer because she had gotten possessed by the spirit of Clive Hockstatter while the girls fucked around with that darn Ouija Board.

Linda screams and runs from the room, her breasts swaying hypnotically through her thin t-shirt.

“Too bad I’m not in a man’s body!” Jessica says. “We could have some fun!”

Linda looks terrified as I grin.

Hey, know who’s still alive?

Orville Ketchum.

Though he has knives sticking out of his body, he lunges into the room and fights Jessica, but he gets stabbed AGAIN and thrown to the opposite wall. Linda takes this time to stab Jessica in her thick body, thus ending the terror.

The cops rush in just in time to be useless, as one of them asks, “Wasn’t this the old Hockstatter place?”

Linda looks all googley-eyed and creepy, since I guess she’s possessed now, and then Orville Ketchum wakes up from death and steals a gun to blow her to smithereens. Then the cops unload all their bullets into the fat hero, who STILL survives.

The end.

This was a fun movie. My favorite part was all the shameless nudity and killing.

SHITTY FLICKS: THE SLUMBER PARTY MASSACRE

Shitty Flicks is an ongoing column that celebrates the most hilariously incompetent, amusingly pedestrian, and mind-bogglingly stupid movies ever made by people with a bit of money, some prior porn-directing experience, and no clue whatsoever. It is here you will find unrestrained joy in movies meant to terrify and thrill, but instead poke at your funny bone with their weird, mutant camp-girl penis.

WARNING: I tend to give away major plot points and twist endings in my reviews because, whatever. Shut up.

NAKED TEENS, MR. CONTANT, FOUND

MASSACRED TO DEATH AT SLUMBER PARTY

LOS ANGELES, California – Four scantily-clad teen girls with substantially-sized breasts, three of their typically annoying boyfriends (including John Minor, the biggest man on campus), their high school basketball coach, and a pizza delivery man were found massacred to death in a suburban home yesterday morning owned by Trish, one of the young victims.

The full and complete legal names of the victims so far identified are Trish, Kimberly, Jackie, Diane, Neil, Jeff, John Minor, Coach, and Mr. Contant, the leering and purposely suspicious looking neighbor.

While considering breaking her own
"No Kiss on the First Date" rule,
she suddenly felt John Minor's
finger south of the equator.

The killer, Russ Thorn - who had easily escaped from the mental asylum where he had been committed - was also found dead in the pool. He was missing a hand, proper character development, a coherent motive, and wearing a denim jacket. It appears that Thorn had used some sort of pneumatic drill to take the lives of his victims, all the while barely getting any blood on himself.

Two other victims were found earlier that day: an unidentified and previously "hot" phone repair woman who was found drilled in the back of her van; and Linda, a student found murdered within her own school - a result of every single door being chained up after classes had let out only five minutes prior.

Janitors of the school are being held for questioning and may be forced to take classes on how to prevent inadvertently creating death traps out of traditionally safe environments.

For a prank, the girls killed
Mary as she slept.

Two survivors, Valerie Bates and her younger sister, Courtney (an avid fan of ashamed masturbation), took the life of the killer in self-defense and miraculously managed to keep their clothes on.

"I'm not sure how I managed to remain clothed throughout the night," says Valerie. "Us teen girls...it's almost effortless that our tops fall off. But I guess that's why I'm still sucking air! Had my top and bra fallen off, my head would probably be sitting in the next-door neighbor's garbage can."

While Valerie's breasts managed to avoid exposure - or the mouth of a very inexperienced teen boy - her ordeal was not without its detriments.

"This incident has made me go batshit insane," continues the eldest Bates girl. "I probably won't be around to save the day, should something like this ever happen again. Courtney will just have to deal with it, I guess."

Courtney was unavailable for comment, as she was playing the bass at a garage practice for her terrible rock band.

"This is one of the oddest crime scenes I have ever seen," says Officer Kruiger, a member of the LAPD. "If I had to take a guess, it would seem that one of the girls actually ate the pizza delivered to them by that delivery boy who had been tragically killed. That's just strange. Who does that? What a dick head."

Officer Vorhies, another police officer, adds: "It's such a tragedy, really. These were just your typical girls: eating junk food, having sporadic and shirtless pillow fights, all the while copulating with their obnoxious boyfriends who acted like they had never seen a single breast in their entire lives. It really is a shame - a shame that I wasn't invited. I would've brought Mall Madness."

"And it's weird that their coach ended up here, too," continues Office Kruiger. "I mean, what the fuck is that? Was she a lesbian? A hot, hot lesbian? Were all these girls lesbians together? Man, I hope so. I hope they were all hot lesbians. I hope they were having some kind of hot, sordid, lesbian affair. I mean, I've seen that team play...there wasn't too much practicing going on. At least not with…balls?”

“Good one, partner,” says Office Vorhies before stopping in sudden alarm. “Oh, shit - how did I not realize until just now that your last name is Kruiger and mine is Vorhies?”

“Corgies?” asks Officer Kruiger.

“Vorhies.”

“Oh. Who cares?”

Officers Kruiger and Vorhies then left to respond to a nearby sorority house where an almost identical massacre had just taken place, committed by the same exact killer but with a completely different backstory, using a completely different name, and who had also died on the scene. It’s really confusing.

Mr. Contant, the neighbor who was also killed by Thorn, says, "It sucks that I died because I was the best character in this neighborhood. I was awesome, I would just pop up out of nowhere in the darkness wielding a cleaver, so of course everyone would think I was the killer. No sir! I was merely hunting snails in the darkness. Let that sink in: I would be in ANOTHER PERSON’S GARAGE HOLDING A MEAT CLEAVER ABOVE THEIR HEAD. Oh, but I'm not the killer. I'm just hunting snails. Hey, me, ever hear of salt? Or better yet, insecticide? But whatever, I can't complain; if I wasn't set up as a red herring every five minutes, I'd barely be in this thing."

Dick Weapon vs Vagina Weapon 2:
The Quickening

Pam, the carpenter known for suddenly drilling holes through front doors so as to provoke a shocking moment, only to sheepishly claim she is making a peephole, offered her own two cents: "This is just a tragedy. What happened here in this community will never be forgotten. A piece of this community's heart died today. We’ll never get over the loss of Mr. Contant."

A nameless friend of Diane remembers her friend as well: "She was so nice. She was a real giver, and she was always telling me when my tits were getting bigger. I'll miss her. Soaping up in the shower room as we talked about penises won't be the same without her."

Rumors that Spy Kids 3D and Oscar actor Sylvester Stallone was sighted at the scene of the crime could not be confirmed, but when his name was brought up during questioning of the younger Bates sister, Courtney, her cheeks grew red and she clenched her legs together.

Rita Mae Brown, author of several books she co-wrote with her stupid cat, Sneakie Pie, says, "Listen, the giant drill, the male killer...I knew what I was doing when I wrote this movie. Of course the killer was going to hold the drill between his legs when he massacred the girls. God, that's clever, isn't it?" Brown then drove off in her stained panel van to continue working on her newest book, Sneakie Pie Bites the Big One.

"Hey, look! Tanya's just...hangin' out?"

"OMG, shut up, Susan."

Mrs. Bates, mother of Valerie and Courtney, tearfully hugs her two daughters, thankful for their lives. "I'm just so glad my daughters are safe; they're all I have. I hope no other giggling teens ever have to endure what my daughters endured, especially Courtney, perhaps while at a friend's beach house when she is older. Or even maybe an unrelated girl who doesn't realize that the killer is her crush - that nice boy, Ken."