FURTHER THAN FEAR

SLAUGHTER HIGH (1986)

God bless you, the ‘80s slasher. You were very rarely “good,” but man oh man, do you get points for not giving up without a fight. I feel like I say his name an awful lot around these parts, but John Carpenter and his low-budget Halloween paved the way for a long line of slashing imitators that would last for ten plus years (and crop up again in the ‘90s following the Halloween-inspired Scream). But whereas Halloween was good enough to transcend that “slasher” title and be a great film in general, alllllll the imitators that would follow in its wake wouldn’t ever achieve the same bragging rights and would have to be judged entirely within the confines of its own sub-genre, i.e., “______ was good…for a slasher flick.”

And Slaughter High is pretty great for a slasher flick.

Starring Caroline Munro along with a lot of other people you’ve never heard of, Slaughter High is the culmination of some pretty solid horror films to have been unleashed up to that point. Obviously the idea of killing teenagers was popularized by Halloween (even if The Texas Chain Saw Massacre had beat it to the punch by four years), but with an opening sequence ripped straight out of Carrie, during which the outcast of a high school is pranked in a sexual manner, leaving the coach to discipline the offenders with grueling exercises, Slaughter High takes these and other inspirations, melds them together, and unleashes them in one formulaic but satisfying bloodbath.

Slaughter High bills itself as a horror/comedy, but minus the opening and closing scenes, there’s nothing particularly comedic about it; it’s actually pretty horrifying. Any sequences having to do with Marty Rantzen, the school’s beleaguered nerd and the target of all the cool kids’ torments, comes off dangerously Troma-esque, but minus those, Slaughter High is fairly straightforward.

As for the quality, well, we can skip saying the acting is bad (it is), that the concept isn’t original (it’s not), and the actors don’t look like teenagers at all during the opening high school prologue (Caroline Munro was 37 at the time and it shows) and get right to what matters: the death scenes. They are wonderful, and with one of Slaughter High’s three(!) directors being a special effects maestro and overseeing only the death scenes, of course they are. Slaughter High boasts some of the best, inventive, and icky death sequences ever seen in the sub-genre. Lawnmowered groins, electric bed sex – forget that a consumer-grade bathtub would never be found in a high school: so long as you fill it with acid and a naked chick, I’m down with it, baby.

The other wonderful aspect to Slaughter High is the score by Harry Manfredini, most famously known for scoring another slasher flick – Friday the 13th and its many, many sequels. Though his music seems more suited for a somewhat darker slasher experience (as the first five Friday flicks were), fans will find it immensely satisfying and even comforting as you see hapless teens barrel down hallways set to his familiar low-string notes.

The very ending of Slaughter High is confusing as fuck and doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, but it seriously doesn’t matter because during Slaughter High someone shotguns a beer can filled with acid and his intestines melt out of his stomach and it’s just the tops.

REMAIN SILENT...FOREVER

JANUARY IS SLASHUARY

The slasher sub-genre is one of my favorite things, and has been since I was a wee one. It was my first foot in the door of the horror genre, and some of the most famous movie maniacs in history – Jason, Michael, Freddy, and more – were there to usher me, smacking my fanny as I passed them because it’s all in good fun. As time went on, I put away this slasher love for a little bit, only breaking it out every so often when the mood struck. (The Friday the 13th and Halloween series got routine play, though. To me, they were in a class all their own.)

As I became a so-called adult, and as the time seems to click louder and louder, I, like everyone else, have been looking fondly back on the 1980s – the allegedly last time it was fully pure to be an American, when things seemed just fine, and everyone was dancing to the first round of synth pop, driving their friends to the beach in a Jeep, and living life with no consequences whatsoever. 

Among these ‘80s memories is the slasher. And man, there’s just nothing like an ‘80s slasher. The sensibilities of that magical decade were like no other, and no decade since has come close to replicating it. The ‘80s meant excess, in every regard: hair got higher, clothes got bigger and brighter, music was faster. Even the drugs were in a hurry. 

As time goes on, it’s become a personal crusade to see every single slasher movie that hails from the ‘80s, from the ones that are clearly slashers to the ones that border the sub-genre while injecting its own distinct sensibilities. Sci-fi, action, mystery, demons, monsters – if teenage bodies are dropping, and if their hair is huge, I’m in. 

So come with me as we celebrate Slashuary – an entire January dedicated to the ‘80s slasher (mostly). Days will alternate between reviews for obscure slashers along with some of my favorite all-time slasher posters, even if they're for movies that kinda suck. Of the titles to appear all month, there will be some good, some not so good, but hey, we’ll be together, and that’s all that matters. 

NEW YEAR'S WATCHING: ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13 (2005)

Remakes of John Carpenter’s films so far haven’t really yielded anything considered a total success in that they were both critically and commercially successful. Even though Rob Zombie’s awful Halloween remake somehow has its defenders, the 2005 remake of The Fog is universally derided, and rightfully so (though both made obscene money at the box office). Meanwhile, the maiden voyage of the Carpenter remake trend was 2005’s Assault on Precinct 13, directed by French filmmaker Jean-François Richet (the similarly underrated Blood Father with Mel Gibson) and boasting a pretty excellent cast of Ethan Hawke, Laurence Fishburne, Gabriel Byrne, Brian Dennehy, Maria Bello, Drea de Matteo, John Leguizamo, and lots more recognizable faces. It came and left theaters quickly, doing moderately well with critics, who apparently were the only ones who saw the thing, which is a shame, because—remake of a beloved cult film or not—it’s pretty damn entertaining.

Like any good remake should do, Assault on Precinct 13 takes the basic concept of the original, maintaining the setting, the characters, and the siege-like component, and throws it all into a blender along with some shake-ups to the story. This time, instead of gang members descending on a decommissioned police precinct, it’s a horde of corrupt cops trying to assassinate gang leader Marion Bishop (Fishburne), who has done his fair share of dirty dealings with those cops and has the power to put them away for good—if he survives New Year’s Eve and testifies against them in court. (Bishop was the name of the hero in the original, played by Austin Stoker; though Fishburne steps into the villain role, it’s without the name “Napoleon Wilson,” which I guess didn’t sound as bad-ass thirty years later.)  Naturally, once the corrupt cops descend on the police station, which lacks any kind of communication lines since the place is no longer “on duty,” and with a blinding New Year’s Eve snowstorm isolating them even further, the precinct’s cops and crooks must band together if they want to survive the night.

The screenplay was handled by James DeMonaco, who had just written the very successful hostage thriller The Negotiator with Samuel L. Jackson and then-beloved Kevin Spacey. Interestingly, DeMonaco would become a force ten years later in Hollywood alongside Blumhouse by writing and directing the Purge series, which DeMonaco had said from the very beginning was inspired by Carpenter and his penchant for siege and anti-order films. Obviously, the original Assault on Precinct 13 was a very low budget affair bordering on grindhouse cinema, made by an unknown and untested director (who in typical Carpenter style also wrote, edited, and scored the film) and starred a cast of unknown or obscure actors. Meanwhile, 2005’s remake is big, glossy, and made with as much spectacle as director Richet can get away with while remaining faithful to the claustrophobic setting. Carpenter has admitted over the years that the original Assault on Precinct 13 was a loose remake/combination of Rio Bravo and Night of the Living Dead, referring to it nearly as a zombie movie, and the redux maintains that same kind of claustrophobic environment where hope for rescue dwindles by the hour.

Appropriately, Richet and DeMonaco are very aware of Carpenter’s overall career as a horror director, even though he’d wandered away from that genre several times to make action-thrillers (Escape from New York), comedies (Memoirs of an Invisible Man), dramas (Elvis), and, as Carpenter likes to put it, “girly movies” (Starman). Because of this, even though this Assault on Precinct 13 is still well within the action-thriller genre, it unfolds almost like a slasher movie, in that several members of its ensemble cast are picked off one by one in violent ways, with many of them not being characters (or actors) you’d ever expect to see bite the big one.  

Ethan Hawke jumps from genre to genre as well, never hanging his hat too long in any one place, though he seldom played the role of action hero even in his youth. Besides the terrible Getaway and the obscure but decent 24 Hours to Live, Assault on Precinct 13 sees Hawke in a rare full-on popcorn action role and you can tell he’s having fun with material that doesn’t require as much psychological pathos as the parts he ordinarily likes to play. (He was phenomenal in last year’s First Reformed, for example.)  Like the geekiest of directors, Hawke respects and enjoys different kinds of films, and he puts in a laudable amount of effort to make his character of Sgt. Jake Roenick more than just your typical apprehensive hero.  As for Fishburne as the “bad guy,” well, as most actors will tell you, it’s always much more fun to play the villain, and he knows it, and he does it well. Fishburne’s intensity and swagger has always cast an intimidating pallor over many of his roles, even when playing the good guy, so it’s not exactly necessary to suspend disbelief when seeing him in this kind of role. 

Carpenter has been sly over the years when asked for his opinions on remakes of his films, saying that though the remakes were based on his movies, those remakes belong to other filmmakers and it wouldn’t be his place to comment. (Me thinks this was mostly his way of having to avoid publicly calling Rob Zombie’s Halloween a piece of shit considering they were friends, even though he basically did that very same thing later on.) Still, Carpenter had kind things to say about Assault on Precinct 13, saying in an interview, “I thought it was terrific. I thought the cast was sensational. I just loved it.” 

He’s not the only one.

HÄXAN (1922)

Generally, when it comes to genre films from the earliest part of the 20th century, two films often come into the conversation: 1920’s The Cabinet Of Dr. Caligari (an all-time favorite) and 1922’s Nosferatu. Given the era, both are silent, black and white, and hail from Germany. Also released during this time, and not too far away, is 1922’s Häxan (meaning The Witches), which hails from nearby Sweden. Though all three films have a lot in common, Nosferatu and The Cabinet Of Dr. Caligari get much of the credit for invigorating the horror genre and film in general; meanwhile, Häxan never got as much love and exposure, which is a shame because it shows just as much ingenuity and creativity—if not more so—but also tells its story in a more provocative and less typical manner. 

Written and directed by Benjamin Christensen, Häxan is broken up into chapters, of sorts, and lives up to its often-used subtitle, Witchcraft through the Ages. Instead of telling a linear plot, Häxan explores different eras and aspects of witchcraft through what could be described as visual essays, relying on incredibly creative on-set special effects and in-camera illusions (as to be expected, being that Häxan  is nearly 100 hundred years old). Though largely a documentary, Häxan presents as a horror-tinged docu-drama with actors standing in to represent various character archetypes who loomed large in the different aspects of witchcraft, magic, and the so-called black arts, which, naturally, were blamed on the influence of the devil (who appears, and is played by director Christensen).

In many ways, Häxan’s approach is relevant even today, in that the film looks at real-life maladies like mental illness, which throughout time was blamed on witchcraft, and warns that misinterpretation, ignorance, and even fear of these issues have the potential to lead down the wrong path. Unfortunately we’re still dealing with this even in our so-called civilized, technologically advanced modern era, in that people with real mental illness are supposed to just “get over it,” or be treated like social pariahs instead of trying to put more effort into what it is, why it is, and what can be done to help.

Häxan is broken up into four parts, each exploring different aspects of mysticism and presenting them in distinct ways. The first part plays almost like a slideshow at a museum, showing different artist creations in the form of paintings and woodcuttings that depict man’s fear of the devil, hell, and his so-called concubines on earth. By the end of the fourth part, Häxan nearly becomes a narrative, following the experiences of inmates at a mental institution, whose barbaric treatment by hospital personnel draw very specific and purposeful parallels to how people (mainly women) were treated during the medieval era once they were accused of witchery. 

Though Häxan evolves as a film over its running time, the finger it points at the problem remains firm and steadfast, blaming, above all, ignorance as the main culprit in how poorly man has treated man since the beginning of recorded history. As a piece of filmmaking, it’s assured, confident, and well made; as a documentary, it’s interesting, insightful, and eye-opening; but as a social piece that reflects the time in which it was made, it’s bleak and even a little depressing, because while it was meant to serve as a warning to future generations to increase their understanding, it instead serves as a reminder of our reality, in that we’re just as ignorant as we ever were—just that our ignorance has since changed forms. 

[Reprinted from Daily Grindhouse.]

RAMBO: LAST BLOOD (2019)

One of the most consistent complaints I’ve seen regarding Rambo: Last Blood, the newest entry in Sylvester Stallone’s long-running Rambo series, was that it “didn’t feel like a Rambo” movie, and in the most superficial of ways, I would agree. Stallone’s shaggy hair is long gone and it feels odd to see him lording over a home that he’d spent the previous 40 years feeling that he could never go back to. Beyond that, though, the claims of Rambo: Last Blood feeling like an outlier is, to be blunt, a misguided outlook. Thanks to pop culture, when you say the name “Rambo,” it conjures certain images that come not from 1982’s First Blood, the legitimately great original where John Rambo kills ZERO people, but the increasingly goofy sequels that veered further and further away from the whole point of the character, which was created to embody the horrors of war-caused PTSD and to highlight the distrustful, aggressive society Vietnam War soldiers came home to. Appropriately, even the naming convention of all the sequels seemed to mirror what the sequels were doing. 1985’s Rambo: First Blood Part II tried to maintain some of the pathos from the original, personified by Stallone’s steely question, “Do we get to win this time?” 1988’s Rambo III drops the “First Blood” portion of the title altogether because, by then, all pathos and subtext was gone in favor of your generic ‘80s action movie that was most certainly a direct response to 1985’s massively successful Commando. And then came 2008’s Rambo, just one of many long-delayed sequels to drop all roman numerals in hopes of luring in a new generational audience who have no idea there are previous films in the franchise, while the brevity of the title also alerts franchise fans that they know exactly what they’re getting. Rambo: Last Blood is probably the most appropriately titled of the sequels, because despite what you may have heard, it’s the sequel that feels the most like First Blood, while also taking one very wide step back from it. 

As tends to happen with all “action” movie franchises, each subsequent sequel feels the need to outdo the previous one’s sheer size and spectacle until the situations become so outlandish that they take you out of the movie. Look no further than the Die Hard or Death Wish series, the latter of which was based on a film that didn’t come close to being an action movie. The Rambo franchise is a perfect example of this. No, Rambo: Last Blood doesn’t feel like the previous few Rambo flicks because the character isn’t engaging in war in some kind of militaristic capacity. He’s not in some third-world country saving POWs or well-meaning missionaries. He’s back at home in Arizona, on the Rambo family ranch, doing his best to quell his demons and focus on the only family he has left – caretakers of the ranch, Maria (Adriana Barraza) and her granddaughter, Gabriela (Yvette Monreal), whom Rambo considers to be his  daughter. It’s when Gabriela becomes kidnapped by human traffickers in Mexico while trying to find her birth father that Rambo: Last Blood essentially becomes Taken mixed with a western while still falling back on John Rambo’s utter hopeless view on the goodness of man and the world at large. 

Rambo: Last Blood, actually, begins on a melancholy note, in that, though John Rambo has been trying to come home ever since the war, even when he finally did, he never really did. His PTSD still looms large, and he spends most of his time in the labyrinthine tunnels below his ranch, alongside his cache of weapons bought and made. While this could simply be a coincidence, or meant to mirror the foxholes in which he’d spent his time as a soldier in Vietnam, it could also be the most direct connective tissue with First Blood, during which he spent a large portion of the second act hiding in an underground cave because it was the only place he felt safe from the world – this along with his homage Home Alone-like booby-traps that litter the third act, and which he'd similarly crafted to use against some angry Washington State cops  almost 40 years prior. Yes, the family angle—the personal, take-revenge angle—doesn’t gel with the character of John Rambo as we know him, but it does gel with this idea that Rambo doesn’t believe the world is capable of good and isn’t worth fighting for; there’s always some kind of instance where injustice weighs heavily on his heart and he can’t not act – he can’t not react and achieve justice for those that weren’t strong enough to obtain it on their own, and who were taken hostage by the evils of the world. 

Being that this is a Rambo flick, and being that it boasts a screenplay by Stallone, it maintains the typical amount of overwrought dialogue and sensibilities audiences have come to expect from him (along with an alarming dip into xenophobia, in that, apparently, all of Mexico is a death trap and should be avoided whenever possible). As a writer, whether throughout his Rambo or Rocky series, Stallone has always been willing to write from the heart, even if he’s making a particular character say or do something corny or unrealistic. He’s always been willing to risk covering his characters in cheese so long as they were coming from a genuine place. Rambo: Last Blood is a continuing example of this philosophy, and there’s an earnest attempt to elevate the material into a drama with action elements rather than the flipside. (Unfortunately, most of this whispered, overwrought dialogue comes from his character, and Stallone’s old age has worsened his lisp to the degree that some of his lines are nearly incomprehensible.) By doing this, audiences who wanted a shirtless Rambo firing double AK-47s into enemy faces were likely disappointed, but those going in with an open mind—who remember and point to First Blood as the truest embodiment of the John Rambo character—stood a better chance of appreciating the experience. I think it’s less that Stallone no longer understands the character, but more that he understands who John Rambo has become in his twilight years. A search-and-rescue mission doesn’t necessarily jive with the Rambo aesthetic, but if John Rambo were facing that conflict head on, Rambo: Last Blood is pretty much what John Rambo would do. He is a warrior on loan to the world, stepping in wherever necessary and bringing his adept skill at taking lives along for the journey. That’s who John Rambo is.

Rambo: Last Blood had been in development since 2008’s Rambo (it currently boasts twenty-eight producers), and went through a couple different early iterations, including one really wacky plotline that saw Rambo being brought in by the U.S. military to hunt an escaped, genetically-engineered panther (this is real), which was based on the book Hunter by James Byron Huggins. (Stallone owns the movie rights and has been trying to adapt it since the mid-‘90s.) Rambo V’s production was plagued by so many false starts, at one point with Stallone saying the movie was probably never going to happen, that it seemed unlikely his version of the character would ever return. In spite of that, Rambo: Last Blood survived a critical drubbing to become the second-best opening of the series at the box office, and you know what that means… Is Rambo: Last Blood truly the last blood? Well, as Hollywood likes to say, never say never. According to Wikipedia, “Stallone has expressed interest in having Rambo take refuge in an Indian reservation for the sixth Rambo film.” If it takes another ten years to develop this sequel, it’s likely that Rambo: Last Blood will live up to its title after all. 

[Reprinted from Daily Grindhouse.]