GREAT PARTY

"I feel you will have to deal with this matter in the harshest possible way, Mr. Torrance..."

If we don't, remember me.

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.

REVIEW: THE FIELDS

In 1969, America was glued to their televisions as news of Charles Manson and his murderous family hit the airwaves: Manson’s maniacal followers had slaughtered the very pregnant Sharon Tate (actress and wife of famed director Roman Polanski) amongst others in her own home. Following this crime, never was the generational gap between flower children and baby boomers more insurmountable. Americans just didn’t know what to do with this. How could this happen? In America? This kind of thing simply didn’t happen here. 

And ever since then, Charles Manson has been a pop-culture phenomenon. Idolized by shock rockers Rob Zombie and the name-stealing Marilyn Manson, the man’s face can be found on t-shirts, posters, bongs, and other paraphernalia sported by awesome, mall-dwelling teens. Even Manson’s music (Charles, not Marilyn) received a very underground release. (He was a musician, did you know that? And a shitty one, at that.) 

More than forty years later we have The Fields, a very unique and brooding film from directors Tom Mattera and David Mazzoni. A combination of Zodiac, The Strangers, and steeped in America’s shock and mourning over the Sharon Tate murders, The Fields is very much a different beast from your usual serial killer movie fare. Because this is not a serial killer movie. Yes, Charles Manson and his family play a large part in the events of this film, but this isn’t a blood-and-guts affair. It’s very much an examination of small-town life in 1973, and the effect that news of Manson’s possibly imminent parole has on its citizens. 

Steven, a young, curly-haired kid, is shipped off to the isolated farm owned by his grandparents (Tom McCarthy and Cloris Leachman) after a very ugly domestic dispute goes down between his parents (Faust Checho and Tara Reid). The parents need to sort out their issues, and both agree Steven should not be around to witness it. The Fields is told through his eyes, and his fear of Charles Manson being released from prison begins to take hold of him. Very strange and suspicious characters are scattered throughout the film, including Eugene, a farm hand with not too much going on upstairs. His first appearance is very unsettling, and with Manson-like floating arms and lilting voice, your immediate first thought is that young Steven’s fears have come true – that Manson has been paroled after all, and has come for him. 

But this isn’t that kind of movie. It’s much smarter than that. It’s very much about the duplication of evil in our world. It suggests that evil is cyclical, and that it’s born at home, in basements right beneath our feet. It is Steven’s fear of Charles Manson that drives the film, and because he is your narrator, you immediately question the things he is seeing – like the demented carnival he discovers after crossing through his grandparents’ cornfield, or the body of the young girl in this same field so very close to their front door… 

Cloris Leachman plays an absolutely wonderful part, embracing her role as Gladys and infusing it with equal parts Bad Santa and Barbara Bush. She brings a lot of heart to the film, and people less familiar with her dramatic side (I’m one of them) will find themselves very surprised. While tabloid/human mess Tara Reid delivers a typical Tara Reid performance, her screen time is limited, so her so-so performance is lost in a sea of great ones and does not up-end the film (though her awful wig threatens to). 

The film was produced by Tommy Lee Wallace, known to most horror fans as the director of Stephen King's IT miniseries, as well as having worked side-by-side with John Carpenter on some of his earlier films, most notably Halloween and The Fog.

As for the events of the film experienced through Steven’s eyes, you might find yourself asking: What’s real? What’s not? Unlike other films of its ilk, The Fields does answer those questions. And because of this, the audience might find their reaction to the film divided. Some like to have things spelled out for them (even if they don’t like the chosen path) while others like to use their own imaginations to determine what they have just witnessed. This may be The Fields’ only shortcoming, depending on what camp in which you tend to find yourself. Then again, this isn’t so much a shortcoming on behalf of the film as it is of the audience and their inability to allow themselves to go where the movie takes them. It’s certainly not for everyone; it has an established pace and it takes its time telling you just enough to wonder what the hell you’re being told in the first place. Despite this, it’s never a frustrating view, and for me was a pleasant surprise. 

Fans looking for something grislier should look elsewhere, but those looking for a meditative slow burn should seriously consider a trip to The Fields.

WOULDN'T HARM A FLY

"12 cabins. 12 vacancies."

If we don't, remember me.

UNSUNG HORRORS: GHOSTWATCH

Every once in a while, a genuinely great horror movie—one that would rightfully be considered a classic, had it gotten more exposure and love at the box office—makes an appearance. It comes, no one notices, and it goes. But movies like this are important. They need to be treasured and remembered. If intelligent, original horror is supported, then that's what we'll begin to receive, in droves. We need to make these movies a part of the legendary genre we hold so dear. Because these are the unsung horrors. These are the movies that should have been successful, but were instead ignored. They should be rightfully praised for the freshness and intelligence and craft that they have contributed to our genre. 

So, better late than never, we’re going to celebrate them now… one at a time. 

Dir. Lesley Manning

1992

BBC

United Kingdom

"This is Orson Welles, ladies and gentlemen, out of character, to assure you that War of the Worlds has no further significance than as the holiday offering it was intended to be; The Mercury Theatre's own radio version of dressing up in a sheet and jumping out of a bush and saying "Boo!" Starting now, we couldn't soap all your windows and steal all your garden gates by tomorrow night, so we did the next best thing: we annihilated the world before your very ears and utterly destroyed the CBS. You will be relieved, I hope, to learn that we didn't mean it, and that both institutions are still open for business. So goodbye everybody, and remember please for the next day or so the terrible lesson you learned tonight. That grinning, glowing, globular invader of your living room is an inhabitant of the pumpkin patch, and if your doorbell rings and nobody's there, that was no Martian; it's Halloween."

- Orson Welles' on-air apology following

 his War of the Worlds broadcast; 

October 30, 1938

Running BBC's 1992 Ghostwatch program for this entry of Unsung Horrors is kind of a cheat for several reasons. First, while I try to feature films reasonably recent, Ghostwatch will turn twenty years old this coming Halloween. Second, its notoriously hard to find. If you've got a region-free DVD  player and deep pockets, then you should be able to order the DVD from Amazon UK fairly easily. Finally, Ghostwatch isn't very unsung. Considering its extremely limited audience and near impossibility to find, it has a wealth of fans. People who have seen it love it and eagerly share stories of how it left them utterly terrified. It's because of this that I couldn't resist running an appreciation of this incredibly eerie and effective film. 

Shot and edited weeks in advance to its air date, Ghostwatch is presented as a live on-air special that spotlights an alleged haunted house on Foxhill Drive in London. The host of this show is Michael Parkinson, a well known (and quite real) British journalist. Next to him sits Dr. Lin Pascoe, a parapsychologist who fervently believes that the spooky events occurring at Foxhill Drive are genuine signs of a haunting. And in the cursed house live the Early family; mother Pam and daughters Suzanne and Kim. Much like modern ghost-hunting shows of today, a camera crew enters the house to investigate the events the Early family claim to have been dealing with for months. Leading this crew is Sarah Greene, another well-known British personality. Sure enough, the house is haunted for real, and as the investigation unfolds, the events within the house steadily increase into utter chaos.

While the crux of Ghostwatch is built around the events occurring inside the house at Foxhill Drive, the power of the story comes from all the different sources of information used throughout the film. Michael Parkinson and Dr. Pascoe provide much of the exposition and background on the investigation, and because they are on a "live" on-air show, they frequently patch in phone calls from "audience members" who share either their own ghostly encounters, or provide even more information about the Foxhill Drive house previously unknown. What this does is add to the legend of the specter haunting the house, and with each new detail, the events become more and more creepy. Think Blair Witch: The first half of that film is the kids gathering information, and the only spooky goings-on are married to stories told by locals and experts. Ghostwatch operates the same way.

The awful thing causing all this havoc is Pipes the ghost, the name derived by the Early children after the first few times their mother had claimed the weird noises they were hearing were caused by their water pipes banging beneath their walls. Over the course of the last few months, Pipes made his presence quite well known, focusing most of his wrath on young Suzanne. The few scarce sightings we have of Pipes, along with eyewitness accounts of the young children, paint a very chilling image of him in our mind, but it's at the very end when Pipes' true origins are revealed is when the film is at its most frightening. The filmmakers do a great job of teasing you with brief sightings of Pipes, but never long enough to give you a full, detailed glimpse of how he actually appears. Brief images of him are scattered throughout, and while the film today can be paused, or slowed down frame-by-frame, twenty years ago the audience had no such options; they watched it unfolding "live" on their televisions, and the brief sightings of him were made to induce moments of "did I just see that?"

Pipes is described as having a skull-like and bald head, a scratched face, and one bloodied eye. He wears a black dress with large buttons running down the middle (the explanation for which is eventually provided), and sightings of him seem to be accompanied by the shrill howls of cats. The image enough is unnerving on its own, but once we find out the ghost's real name, his origins, and how he possibly might have come to be, it becomes much more so.

Your pranksters.

Ghostwatch plays out in real time, darting back and forth between the live feed in the house and the studio. Every actor handles their part with ease, from those playing different people to those playing versions of themselves; all the performances come across as very genuine. Despite the more lurid attacks young Suzanne endures, or the terror Sarah Greene finds herself facing, it's Michael Parkinson that has the most interesting role; his performance is incredibly realistic, in that it suggests he doesn't take much of what Dr. Pascoe and the Early family are telling him all that seriously, but is willing to go along with it for the sake of journalistic objectivity. Being a real journalist, he knows he cannot let his own prejudices cloud his attempts to tell a story.

Ghostwatch remained unavailable on home video for ten years after its airing for quite an interesting and unfortunate reason: Despite the film running during the same time slot that a popular (and scripted) BBC series called "Screen One" usually ran, despite the program being preceded by a "written by" credit, and despite the call-in number provided during the program stating that the program callers were watching was a work of fiction, certain members of Ghostwatch's viewing audience thought it was real, and it really fucked with their minds; from the revealed origins of Pipes to the in-studio phone calls made by "audience members" experiencing weird occurrences in their own home seemly caused by the events in the program - they bought it all: hook, line, and sinker. 

And while any writer who crafted such a project might say, "Then I've done my job!" he probably didn't count on, hope for, or expect the effect it would have on some lesser-stabled viewers:

18-year-old factory worker Martin Denham, who suffered from learning difficulties and had a mental age of 13, committed suicide five days after the programme aired. The family home had suffered with a faulty central heating system which had caused the pipes to knock; Denham linked this to the activity in the show causing great worry. He left a suicide note reading "if there are ghosts I will be ... with you always as a ghost." His mother and stepfather, April and Percy Denham, blamed the BBC. They claimed that Martin was "hypnotised and obsessed" by the programme. The Broadcasting Standards Commission refused their complaint, along with 34 others, as being outside their remit, but the High Court granted the Denhams permission for a judicial review requiring the BSC to hear their complaint. (Wiki.)

And so, following such controversy, any future broadcasts of the program were pulled, and for ten years it remained unavailable on home video. A ten-year anniversary VHS and DVD were issued but are now out of print.

Part of me wishes I had been a London native while watching Ghostwatch for the first time. I'm sure the power of the film's realism is enforced when seeing the likes of Michael Parkinson, Sarah Greene, Mike Smith, and Craig Charles all dealing with the paranormal activity in very different ways - because they are all real people; very well-known television and media personalities playing victimized and scared versions of themselves. An American equivalent of the cast might have Regis Philbin (but perhaps someone with a bit more esteem) as the host, with any assortment of other well-known personalities filling out the cast of the studio crew. Perhaps Kelly Rippa as Sarah Greene, since I just opened that door. Then again, the familiarity of them might destroy the illusion that what we're seeing is real. Maybe it's best that I had no idea who any of these TV personalities were until after I watched the film and did a bit of research.

I love Ghostwatch for many reasons, but most of all, I love it because it was planned, written, and executed simply to have something fun to play on Halloween night. Normal scripted shows will often incorporate Halloween into one of their plots, much like "The Simpsons" continues to do with their annual Treehouse of Horror episodes; "Ghost Adventures" and "Ghost Hunters" will perform a "live" investigation to honor the dark night. But you hardly ever see a program being created from scratch to pay tribute to October 31st. It feels like a perfect melded concoction of paint-by-numbers television and reality - and all to give viewers something a little spooky to watch as they put to bed another Halloween night. I'd love for a major network to put something like this together - to concoct a Ghostwatch of their own. Found footage has never been more popular than it is right now, and with the format being applied to television with the likes of "The River" and "The Lost Tapes," I'm surprised this program hasn't been snapped up for some kind of Americanization. Is it because we've become jaded towards Halloween? Do American studios instead want to focus on seeing a Halloween-themed episode of "The Kardashians" as each of the spoiled divas dress like a slutty witch and say something inherently racist?

Ghostwatch has become annual and essential Halloween viewing in my home. If you're able to find it, I'm sure it'll become a part of yours, too.

Read a retrospective article on Ghostwatch and its legacy - recollected by the cast and crew.

HEY, KNOW WHAT'S A REAL MOVIE?

HAPPY APRIL 21st