Slumber Party Massacre 2 (1987)

Tagline: Let’s take a shit on Joe Pelone’s childhood.

Curiosity: I hated this movie so much when I was a kid. But it came bundled with Slumber Party Massacre so…

Plot: Courtney (Crystal Bernand, Wings) is a well-liked teen. Her high school crush Matt (Patrick Lowe) seems interested in her. Her band, which sounds like The Bangles which really means they sound like The Hollies with female harmonies, is starting to come together. And now she’s going to take a weekend vacation with them to celebrate her birthday. Yep, everything is totally awesome for Courtney.Then a dude with a giant power drill (Atanas Ilitch) shows up and murders them all.

Thoughts: Man, fuck this movie. Slumber Party Massacre 2 completely loses sight of what made the original film so great. Slumber Party Massacre was an uncomplicated slasher flick that doubled as a dark comedy. It offered simple thrills, if you wanted them, but it was also pretty darn funny, all but guaranteeing itself a cult-following. The sequel, however, gets everything wrong.

The original was a crowd-pleaser, dishing out nudity and gore right away. The sequel doesn’t get to the murderizing until the final 30 minutes. While it offers a few bogus “dream sequence” scares, they’re all stupid. Courtney bites into a sandwich and thinks it’s a hand! SpoOoOoky! The film tries to push this “is it real or imaginary” angle by implying that Courtney is insane, which I honesty buy because A) she has some pretty intense/idiotic hallucinations and B) it’s the only way I can accept that the killer is a leather-clad rock ‘n’ roller with a guitar/drill. I feel like producer Roger Corman sat down with writer/director Deborah Brock and was like, “What do kids like? Rock ‘n’ roll, right? Put that in there!” The Driller Killer is so cartoonishly designed to seem cool that he just looks pathetic.

Slumber Party Massacre 2 cribs moves from Rocky Horror Picture Show and A Nightmare on Elm Street (and shamelessly plugs Rock ‘n’ Roll High School, another Corman production starring The Ramones. Broke actually went on to make a sequel to it, and it was just as crappy as this movie), but it never coheres into the sort of sexy/creepy/fun set-up of those films. While there are cool/graphic kills late in the film, overall it is neither scary nor kitschy enough to function as a horror or comedy film. And that ’80s soundtrack hurts, man.

Also, there aren’t enough boobs.

Reflection: If I was Courtney’s friend… wait, no. We would never be friends. Bitch is crazy.

Slumber Party Massacre (1982)

Tagline: Close your eyes for a second... and sleep forever.

Curiosity: This one is another childhood classic.

Plot: Typical naked lusty teen Trish (Michele Michaels) is having a party and invites her basketball teammates over for a night of smoking, drinking, and talking about boys. Her teammate Val (Robin Stille) doesn’t go, though. She dominates the basketball court, but she doesn’t how to handle the court… of conversation. That’s OK by Trish and her friends, though. They still light up a couple of doobies and have fun.

Then a dude with a giant power drill (Michael Villella) shows up and murders them all.

Thoughts: My best friend in middle school was this cat named Rob. His mother was way more lenient than mine when it came to movies, so we spent many an afternoon renting horror movies. Let’s face it; when you’re 12, a title like Slumber Party Massacre is going to grab you. At the time, I found the film titillating and frightening. Death by power drill is a bad way to go. Also, there are boobs.

I hadn’t seen the film in maybe 12 years or so, hadn’t really considered it until its recent re-release on DVD. A few reviews talked up the film’s touches of feminism and humor, to a point where it over-intellectualized what I remembered as a fairly straightforward slasher flick. Also, there are boobs. So I was shocked to find out that, yeah, Slumber Party Massacre is actually a lot smarter than the typical Halloween rip-off.

That’s not to say the film doesn’t follow conventions. It still has a typical plot – promiscuous teens get picked off by a psycho killer. And the gore is pretty tame compared to the recent works of Eli Roth, Ti West, and Alexandre Aja. But that’s part of what helps the film succeed. It’s not bogged down by aged effects and never tips its hand straight into the horror genre. It’s really more of a black comedy. I can’t believe I remembered the scene where a girl keeps almost discovering a dead body in a refrigerator all these years later, but it turns out this is one of the film’s most iconic scenes. Other parts are legitimately scary, like the implied drill attacks. Villella spends most of the movie lingering in the margins. He only gets one scene with dialogue, but he makes it count. He's damn creepy telling the girls that his murder spree is an act of love, and he does this weird thing where he cocks his head around like a bird.

Arguments for the film’s feminist bent are valid too. The movie flips plenty of conventions, both for horror films and societal norms. Women are the ones with stereotypically masculine jobs (gym coach, carpenter, electrician). Men are the ones who die horrible, protracted deaths while the women get off relatively easy. And the symbolism of the ending, not to get all spoiler-y, is so forehead-slappingly obvious that it becomes awesome. Yeah, this was a Roger Corman feature, but director Amy Holden Jones (she also wrote Beethoven and Mystic Pizza AND worked on Taxi Driver) and writer Rita Mae Brown infuse the movie with way more quality than such a feature probably deserves. Also, there are boobs.

Reflection: Jones turned down E.T. to make this movie.

Legendary (2010)

Tagline: Some legends are born out of struggle.

Curiosity: The Marine. ’Nuff said.

Plot: Cal (Devon Graye) is a scrawny, dorky nerd-geek. I mean, he wears glasses! But he wants to be a manly man like his ne’er-do-well brother Mike (John Cena) and deceased father by becoming a wrestler. Against the wishes of his angsty mother (Patricia Clarkson), he contacts Mike and together they start training for wrastlin’. Danny Glover shows up as a magical black guy on occasion to say stuff like “Some legends are made from the sweat of men who rise to the problems of their day” or some shit.

Thoughts: Folks, my college roommates and I are huge fans of the international hit The Marine. We originally went to see it as a joke, but it’s actually one of the best action flicks of all time. It made me swear allegiance to Cena. And while that fandom was rewarded by Cena’s next flick, 12 Rounds, Legendary has left me questioning my life’s ambitions. The film has a made-for-TV quality that permeates its every aspect.

The dialogue is hammy and clunky throughout. I sometimes wonder if the writer John Posey knows what young people sound like. Romantic interest Luli (Madeleine Martin) is meant to be alternative or goth or whatever, and plenty of people comment on how she is thoroughly weird, but ultimately she’s just a pale kid with black hair. Everything she says and does is exactly like all the other Southern teens in town. The film also wastes obvious talents like Clarkson (The Green Mile, The Untouchables) and Glover (Predator 2… and some other stuff). Clarkson is reduced to screaming and crying all the time; Glover sadly gets the worst dialogue. That dude was in Angels in the Outfield, Be Kind Rewind, and The Royal Tenenbaums. He deserves better. This role should have been given to Ric Flair.

Still, the emotional core of the movie lies in Cal and Mike’s relationship, and Graye and Cena deliver. It helps that they kind of look like they could be brothers, but the scenes where they talk about wrestling have a believable warmth to them. That said, watching Cena here is painful in places. Acting is sort of like tennis; you need to be with people of your own ability. Clarkson acts with her entire body; Cena says words. Their scenes together feel… uneven. Still, the film generally sticks to Cena’s strengths. He can fight and be angry. But I think someone needs to take advantage of his comedic chops soon.

Reflection: I don’t think I’m going to buy Fred: The Movie. OR WILL I?

Session 9 (2001)

Tagline: Fear is a place.

Curiosity: My friends reference this four-second clip a lot:



Plot: Gordon (Peter Mullan, Children of Men, Trainspotting) runs an asbestos crew. His company badly needs money and takes on a difficult job refurbishing an old asylum. While Gordon nearly goes insane trying to get work done and reconnect with his estranged wife, the rest of the team keeps things going.

Then shit starts to get real. Hank (Josh Lucas) disappears after trying to steal a large sum of cash he found hidden in the hospital. Gordon’s behavior becomes more and more erratic. Intercut between these scenes are audio tapes fellow worker Mike (Steven Gevedon) finds from therapy sessions with Marry Hobbes (Jurian Hughes), a woman with multiple personality disorder, leading up to the frightening, terrifying, downright unpleasant Session 9 (!!!).

Thoughts: Taken overall, Session 9 is a gripping psychological thriller. I mean that in the strictest sense too. The plot involves some pretty grisly bits, but writer/director Brad Anderson (The Machinist, Transsiberian) handles everything tastefully, leaving a lot of scares to dialogue and imagination. Mullan and David Caruso are game for all sorts of creepy activities, as is the rest of the cast. The problem lies in the script.

Session 9 is pretty good, but it’s not perfect. The dialogue is ho-hum, occasionally spelling out things too much. There are a couple of instances where foreshadowing dialogue is too on-the-nose. Other exchanges are just artless. I think Anderson could have trimmed a couple of seconds here and there, excising maybe as much as 10 minutes of film from the 102-minute running time. Three-quarters of the way through, the movie hits a wall where the viewer will have figured out two possible endings, and it spins around for a bit needlessly before finally delivering the outcome. The Session 9 segments that give the film its title are more compelling in this regard; they’re free of excess but full of mounting dread.

But it’s still worth it just to watch Caruso act.

Reflection: Hey… FUCK YOU.

From Beyond (1986)

Tagline: Humans are such easy prey.

Curiosity: Scott promised me gore, Jeffrey Combs, and Ken Foree from the original Dawn of the Dead.

Plot: Dr. Tillinghast (Combs) and Dr. Pretorius (Ted Sorel) are working on a machine called the Resonator. It’s meant to stimulate the pineal gland and, in doing so, grant the ability to see beyond our dimension (and, uh, give you scary sex cravings). It works a little too well, though, as it opens a portal to another dimension which, given that is based on the works of H.P. Lovecraft, is a bad thing. Dr. Pretorious gets his head bitten off, and it’s up to Dr. McMichaels (Barbara Crampton) and Detective Bubba Brownlee (Foree) to figure out how the heck that happened. Sexual hijinks abounds.

Thoughts: Lovecraft’s work is notorious hard to adapt for movies and television, so I was surprised to find out From Beyond came out 24 years ago. While it was a flop at the time of its release, the movie successfully nails Lovecraft’s tone (sort of) while delivering a digestible story and gore galore. The ’80s were a good time for creature features, and while Beyond isn’t exactly The Thing, the film’s effects and puppetry create a horrifying/awesome alternate reality. If this movie was made today, it would be stuffed with CGI and look terrible. Instead, it’s a technical buffet supplemented by great performances. Foree is slightly wasted, but he still gets in some bits. Combs and Crampton take turns being sexual and psychic freaks, driving the plot along. Sorel’s character comes back in the movie as the antagonist (um, spoiler, I guess?), and he’s got-damn creepy. So, mission accomplished.

From Beyond also works well because it doesn’t delve too deeply into Lovecraftian lore. In short, there’s no Cthulu or Elder Gods. It hints at that stuff, but it doesn’t force it too much. Hardcore fans can nod in appreciation; newbies don’t have to do an obscene amount of homework to catchy up. The film is briskly paced at 85 minutes, so it doesn’t really have much time to explain much anyway. Here’s the Resonator. It totally opens portals and shit. Also it turns you into a sex fiend. Next scene, next scene, repeat, repeat. While the film occasionally jumps forward too quickly – Foree needs more dialogue, dammit! – it’s still a great horror flick overall.

Reflection: DO NOT WATCH THIS WITH YOUR PARENTS.

Tron (1982)

Tagline: A world inside the computer where man has never been. Never before now.

Curiosity: It’s the Matrix of the ’80s. Also I wanted to bone up before belated sequel Tron: Legacy drops.

Plot: Flynn (Jeff “The Dude” Bridges) is a computer programmer working on bringing down corporate hack Ed Dillinger (David Warner), who ripped off several video games he designed. Dillinger has since navigated his pirated material to the top of the corporate ladder, but Flynn’s buddy Alan (Bruce Boxleitner) suspects he’s up to something. Turns out Dillinger didn’t stop at stealing video games; his program Master Control has been stealing bits of data from all over, and is preparing to invade the White House. Flynn, Alan, and Alan’s girlfriend/scientist buddy Lora (Cindy Morgan) attempt to find out the truth, but when Flynn gets too close, Master Control sucks him inside a computer.

Then things get trippy.

Thoughts: I think filmmakers took all the wrong lessons from Tron. It’s been heralded as a breakthrough in computer animation – which it is – but the film didn’t rely on any one trick to create its otherworldly look. In fact, there’s only about 15 minutes total of CGI in the film. The rest utilizes a combination of back lighting, set design, film scratching, and good ol’ fashioned acting to create the weirdly neon world inside a computer.

Even then, Tron isn’t a perfect film. The story tosses out a lot of sci-fi concepts that could support entire other films in order to get to its main idea: What if “The Dude” got sucked into a computer? Early on the film tosses out ideas like teleportation and sentient A.I. in order to explain its central plot, and it doesn’t really do that great of a job explaining, and therefore validating, those concepts. In fact, the script skips a few important steps in order to get Bridges inside the damn computer.

But while Tron’s first 30 minutes are rushed, the film eventually gives itself over to the computer world and starts turning out one eye-popping scene after the next. While the CGI is certainly primitive by today’s standards, it still fits the setting perfectly. Yeah, the movie sometimes bullshits its way through science-y stuff, but it’s fucking Tron.

Reflection: I’m a nerd.

The Kids in the Hall (1988-2010)

Tagline: I’m crushing your heads!

Curiosity: Five grown Canadian men tell weird jokes while wearing dresses.

Plot: While they began as a live comedy troupe, to those of us outside the Toronto area, the Kids in the Hall can be broken up into three sections: 1) a sketch show that ran for five seasons, 2) a dark comedy called Brain Candy, and 3) a recent mini-series called Death Comes to Town. All three are noted for a sense of humor that’s off the wall – its closest American counterpart would be Mr. Show – but not as crude. The group rarely goes for obvious gross out laughs, and even when they do, they twist them with a dark edge.

The most revered of the three is the original Kids in the Hall show. It ran for five seasons and built up a considerable audience in Canada and the U.S. I grew up on the show thanks to re-runs after school on Comedy Central, and finally got around to collecting all of the seasons on DVD. Overall, the show holds up. Each season peters out near the end, but I mean, c’mon, you try coming up with 20 episodes of sketch comedy. Despite some dated ’90s token references, the show holds up remarkably. If anything, it’s gotten better with age. Thanks to stuff like Adult Swim, Kids is no longer the weirdest thing on TV, but it walks such a fine line between crass and cute. Consider these two sketches starring cast member Bruce McCulloch:





They’re both funny, but for different, perhaps uncomfortable reasons. The show works because it throws so many different ideas out at once. Its closest companions would be Mr. Show and Monty Python’s Flying Circus, but Kids also slips in more mainstream humor a la Saturday Night Live. For me, it’s kind of like a fulcrum for judging all other comedy. Everything else is either safer or more dangerous than the Kids, but few are as funny. Sure, it takes a while for the group to consistently hit big laughs – season three is when they really hit their stride, just like Mr. Show – but they get there. And as dependent as they were on recurring characters, the writers tried to find new situations for those old wells. If an idea stopped being funny, then it stopped getting used (Although I could have done with fewer Chicken Lady sketches, and even Buddy Cole got a little overused… Also, I never understood the appeal behind Terry and Jerry). Imagine if SNL applied that logic this season.

Speaking of SNL, it’s amazing how many cheap laughs Kids didn’t go for. In true Shakespearian fashion, the men dressed up as women, and while they occasionally kissed, it was rarely done for laughs. If these were SNL sketches, that alone would have been the premise. Same for gay characters. Kids posits gays as real people and then moves on to an actual scene. As stereotypical as Buddy got at times, his sketches still had jokes beyond “BUTTSEX HA HA.” Man, those Canadians are so levelheaded.

Five seasons was a good run for the show. While part of me wishes there was more, the show never dipped in quality. The same cannot be said for Brain Candy, the team’s ill-fated attempt at a motion picture. Brain Candy suffers from a lot of problems. Freed from censorship, the guys tried out some of their most offensive ideas yet, like Cancer Boy, whose source of humor comes from having fucking cancer. It didn’t help that the guys had script issues. Their arguments eventually got so bad that Dave Foley quit the Kids. If you go back and check the credits, his name is missing from the writers list, and he even gets knocked down to a “featuring” listing.

But Brain Candy is no longer the terrible coda to the Kids’ legacy. After a few successful tours, the guys got back into the TV game with Death Comes to Town, an eight-part murder/mystery with some of the group’s darkest humor yet. For a taste, my favorite joke revolves around Foley playing the kindly old town abortionist. While the series occasionally gets too bogged down in cartoonish behavior and plot to tell good jokes, Death is still a solid viewing experience. The Kids still got it.



Also, for the record, my favorite member is Kevin McDonald. He provides the best support and came up with some great characters (THE PIT OF ULTIMATE DARKNESS!). While his monologues weren’t as consistent as McCulloch’s or Scott Thompson’s, he still gave us the “I’m Buddy fucking Holly” sketch:



Reflection: The weirdest part about Death is admitting to myself that Dave Foley STILL looks hot in a dress.