Slashing With the Nasties

One thing which is notable about the “video nasty” moral panic of the 1980s is the way it was somewhat classist in what it chose to target. Arthouse movies by and large got by scot free, but lowbrow B-movies got hammered, and sure, extreme content tends to be the purview of B-movies, but then again Last House On the Left was directly inspired by Ingmar Bergman’s The Virgin Spring but only one of those got on the infamous Department of Public Prosecutions list.

What with the moral panic coinciding with the heyday of the slasher movie, a swathe of slasher and slasher-adjacent films ended up either on the DPP list or otherwise associated with the “video nasty” concept due to gaining ostentatious levels of BBFC approval. Here’s three of them which somehow ended up on my to-watch pile at some point.

Mother’s Day

We open our story at a meeting of EGO – a cultish self-help group run by the buzzword-spouting Ernie (Bobby Collins) – the name stands for Ernie’s Growth Opportunity. Two youths who dress like an extremely square person’s idea of what the Manson Family looked like end up getting a lift from a sweet old lady (Beatrice Pons). The hippies obviously planning on killing and robbing her – but before they can enact her plan, she leads them into the clutches of her ultraviolent sons, Ike (Gary Pollard) and Addley (Michael McCleery), who decapitate the dude, beat down the young lady, then watch as their mother garottes the girl whilst they snigger in the background like Beavis and Butthead.

We jump to 1980. The Rat Pack, a trio of former college dormmates, have retained their friendships even though they all graduated and went their separate ways 10 years ago and have lived very different lives since. Trina (Tiana Pierce) has become a dyed in the wool yuppie, throwing bawdy booze and cocaine-fuelled pool parties, Jackie (Deborah Luce) has become an untidy New York slacker haunting the periphery of the art world, whilst Abbey (Nancy Hendrickson) has made lots of personal sacrifices in order to care for her sick mother.

Each year, the Rat Pack take it in turns to arrange “mystery weekends” for the gang to all enjoy together. Jackie, it turns out, has arranged the reunion this year – a camping trip in the New Jersey Pine Barrens (or the “Deep Barons”, as a local roadsign has it). Unfortunately, that’s where that creepy murder family from the pre-credits sequence live! When the Rat Pack are kidnapped by the family, the women are going to need to pull out all of their ingenuity to survive… but who or what is Queenie, the one individual that Mother seems to he scared of?

Bad Dreams, Folk Curses, and Creepy Kids From a Forgotten USA

Arrow Video certainly haven’t been hasty in releasing the second boxed set in their American Horror Project series. Like the first box, it’s a set of three largely overlooked US horror movies from the 1970s – representatives of a strata of American indie horror cinema which more famous releases like The Last House On the Left or The Texas Chain Saw Massacre represent the tip of the iceberg of. It took 3 years after the release of the first one for the second box to emerge  – was it worth the wait? Let’s see…

Dream No Evil

Grace MacDonald (played as an adult by Brooke Mills, as a child by Vicki Schreck) grew up in an orphanage, but was tormented by overwhelming dreams that her father was going to come and take her out of there. It never happens; instead, she is adopted by the Bundy family, who make their living in travelling preacher game, and in that family she grows to adulthood, though never quite letting go of the search for her father.

We catch up with Grace after the death of Ma and Pa Bundy; one of her adoptive brothers, Jessie (Michael Pataki), has inherited the mantle of preacher and has reduced the show into a tawdry circus-esque act – a tent revival too crummy to afford an actual tent, in which Grace performs a high-dive act as part of the show. Her other adoptive brother, Patrick (Paul Prokop), has gone off to medical school, and she’s gotten engaged to him – which, whilst not incest in a purely biological sense, is kind of creepy in its own right.

For his part, now that he’s out in the wider world and not in the insular world of the travelling revival, Patrick gradually finds his attachment to Grace is fading and he’s falling for Shirley (Donna Anders), a fellow medical student. When Grace heads out after her act one night to chase up a lead on her father in the small town she and Jessie are performing in, what she finds is a strange hotel which turns a blind eye to the local undertaker/pimp (Marc Lawrence) bringing prostitutes around to cheer up the residents. The undertaker mentions that he knows Grace’s father, Timothy MacDonald (Edmond O’Brien), that he died just yesterday, and if she wishes Grace can swing by and see the body. Then the body gets up off the slab and kills the undertaker…

We then catch up with Grace and Timothy as they settle into a new existence in a lovely big farmhouse on a delightful ranch, with a pretty horse called Sultan. Wait, what? Where did either of them get the means to acquire this place? Why does the place flip between being beautifully well-maintained and horribly dilapidated? And why does Timothy keep losing his temper and killing people?

Supernatural Slasher Blues

Of all the subgenres of horror, slasher movies have the most conflicted relationship with the supernatural. Some of them make do without any supernatural elements whatsoever; others incorporate it in an ambiguous manner, like how in the original Halloween it isn’t clear whether Michael Myers is truly a supernaturally unstoppable force or merely possesses above average toughness.

And then, just sometimes, a slasher movie will go full supernatural, at which point the usual slasher stalk-and-slay dynamic changes comprehensively. A Nightmare On Elm Street might be the most famous example of that, alongside some of the more offbeat Halloween and Friday the 13th sequels: here’s some more obscure ones.

The Boogeyman

The opening, with the nighttime shot prowling around the exterior of the house set against a very John Carpenter-esque synthesiser soundtrack, is a transparent rip-off of Halloween. We even get a child killing someone in their household, just like Halloween! This time, however, there’s extenuating circumstances; young children Lacey (Natasha Sciano) and Willy (Jay Wright) are peeping on their mother (Gillian Gordon) starting to get it on with her boyfriend, who is never named in the movie and only credited as “the Lover” (Howard Grant). An annoyed Lover decides that an appropriate, proportionate response to this gagging and tying Willy to Willy’s bed. Lacey gets a big ol’ kitchen knife and frees Willy; Willy takes the knife and kills the Lover, which I guess in a way is freeing himself and Lacey.

Years later, and Lacey and Willy – now played by Suzanna Love and Nicholas Love respectively – are all grown up. Willy was traumatised by his childhood deeds, and has never spoken since the killing. Lacey is doing better; she’s married to local cop Jake (Ron James) and the pair have a child of their own, little Kevin (Raymond Boyden). Lacey’s family, along with Willy, live in the sprawling house of Aunt Helen (Felicite Morgan) and Uncle Earnest (Bill Rayburn), who took them in after the killing and have provided them with a loving home.

The Italian Alien Rip-Offs

As I’ve frequently highlighted here, somewhere in the transition from the 1970s to the 1980s Italian genre cinema lost its way; whereas previously it had produced an interesting mix of highbrow and schlock material, somewhere along the way a race to the bottom began, yielding a glut sloppy B-movies turfed out in a hurry, often for the sake of ripping off some more prominent, more successful movie. When Alien was a hit in 1979, it was inevitable that Italian producers would try to rip it off. Let’s take a look at two attempts, neither of which manage to capture the charm of the original movie.

Alien 2: On Earth

We open as journalists assemble to cover the the return of a mission to space, the capsule expected to splash down in the ocean. Meanwhile, caving expert Thelma Joyce (Belinda Mayne) hustles to a TV studio (which seems to be located inside an old cinema, based on the exterior shots), where the local station is going to interview her about her group’s explorations as a way of filling time until the astronauts show up. Thelma, during the interview, shows signs of illness; her husband Roy (Mark Rodin) explains that Thelma is telepathic and she sometimes has funny turns when significant things happen (in the same tone of voice you’d use to explain that someone has a mild allergy to cats).

After the interview Thelma drags Roy and, later, the rest of the caving team around town doing various weird errands – meeting some guy from a yacht who tells her to ignore her concerns, and then randomly yelling at a little girl at the beach for no reason. Well, perhaps she did have a precognitive reason – for after Thelma leaves, the child encounters something squamous and eldritch on the beach and disappears, and when her mother finds her she’s had her face ripped off (though apparently this leaves no bloodstains or trail of blood and she is still able to sit there sobbing like someone broke her favourite toy despite lacking any of the parts of the body which would allow you to cry).

Lenzi’s Variable Focus

Umberto Lenzi’s career, like many Italian directors of his generation, would require him over the years to adapt to a range of different genres. Tending to work more towards the sleazier end of the spectrum, he’d happily turn out sword and sandal epics, spy movies, gialli, or whatever other flavour of schlock was in vogue at the time, though he also made some original contributions of his own – for instance, his Man From Deep River is considered to have kicked off the cannibal subgenre (and his later Cannibal Ferox is, alongside Deodato’s Cannibal Holocaust, held to be the point where people said “OK, enough of this, the ‘who can be grimmer’ competition is over and we have our tied winners”).

As with any Italian director from this era, the quality of his output varied widely. Lenzi seemed happy to pitch his movies at the level demanded by the genre he was working in – going a bit more sophisticated for giallo, a bit sleazier for zombie movies, and so on – and when Lenzi is truly phoning it in, the results are awful. (Ghosthouse is only worth watching in the Rifftrax version.) Here’s a brace of three of his movies which have had recent Blu-Ray releases to illustrate what I mean.

Spasmo

Despite its title sounding like the sort of playground insult that people should really know better than to use these days (it’s a perfectly legit Italian word which happens to sound terrible in English), Spasmo does in fact at least start off as one of the more clever giallos out there. A young man and his girlfriend ride their motorbike to a ruined cottage by the coast to get some privacy – though they’re not so concerned about privacy that they’re shy to ask a dark figure sat in a car a little way away from the cottage to light a cigarette for them. In the middle of their making out, they are interrupted by…

The Clumsy World of Bruno Mattei

Back in the 1970s, Italian horror cinema tended to have a good reputation – the greats like Dario Argento were producing some of the most aesthetically interesting entries in the genre, the “giallo” trend paved the way for the modern slasher movie but always seemed to be a touch more thoughtful than Friday the 13th and its imitators, and even the B-grade material had at least some interesting ideas underpinning it.

Then in the late 1970s and early 1980s, things changes. Whilst you still had good, thoughtful directors producing good, thoughtful films, the industry shifted and a greater emphasis on producing cheap rip-offs of more popular films took hold. A few islands of arthouse horror remained, but they were increasingly threatened by the rising tide of exploitation trash.

One of the most infamous producers of terrible B-movie trash in this scene was Bruno Mattei. Often working closely with his regular scriptwriter Claudio Fragasso – who’d go on to direct Troll 2 – Mattei would leave a trail of cinematic wreckage behind him. Astonishingly, some of these managed to attain controversy – in particular, Hell of the Living Dead actually made the Department of Public Prosecutions’ video nasty list, though a failed prosecution led to it being removed from the most serious category. This can only be due to confusion between Hell of the Living Dead and one of the various zombie films it rips off – for it’s more of a “video clumsy”, a piece offensive not because of inappropriate content so much as incompetent delivery.

Hell of the Living Dead (AKA Zombie Creeping Flesh, AKA Virus)

At a mysterious chemical plant an experiment that is not really explained to the audience in any way is in progress. (At one point it’s referred to as “Operation Sweet Death”, which is hardly encouraging.) Some of the scientists are conducting checks in hazmat suits with large, flappy hoods which aren’t actually tucked in or secured in any way – as a result of which the suits are not in any way airtight, watertight, or capable of resisting… say… an out-of-control zombie rat that jumps into one of their suits and starts attacking one of them, or for that matter a massive leak of toxic gas when the scientist who’s been attacked falls over in a bloody mess.

Video Clumsy: Zombi Holocaust

So, you know how I talked about how Fulci’s Zombie Flesh Eaters sets up the viewer to expect something along the lines of the then-thriving cannibal movie genre only to end up avoiding the racist tropes and conventions of that subgenre? Well, in making this 1981 release – one of the first knockoffs to try and mimic Zombie Flesh Eaters on the cheap -director Marino Girolami had absolutely no qualms about throwing in a bunch of cannibals to the mixture and treating them as every bit the cliched cartoon characters the worst entries in the cannibal movie subgenre present.

As with Flesh Eaters, the action starts out in New York City, where a hospital has been struggling with a spate of mutilations – dead bodies in the morgue have had parts removed for some unknown purpose. It isn’t long before the the culprit is discovered – Toran (Turam Quibo) one of the morgue attendants – and highly trained anthropologist-doctor Lori (Alexandra Della Colli) recognises Toran’s ritual tattoo as the sign of a cannibal tribe from an island in Indonesia, worshippers of the volcano god Kito. Dr. Peter Chandler (Ian McCulloch, fresh off Zombie Flesh Eaters), who appears to be some sort of multiclass doctor-cop-spy, reveals to Lori that this is just one of a string of similar incidents that have been happening across the US, each of which involving an immigrant from the selfsame island.

Peter and Lori end up leading an expedition to track down the tribe and work out what they’re up to. Luckily enough, Peter is on good terms with Dr. Obrero (Donald O’Brien), a world-famous surgeon who settled in the area some five or six years ago and who can help point them on the right direction and give them a guide in the form of Molotto (Dakar, another Zombie Flesh Eaters veteran). Little do they realise that the Kito cannibals are caught up in a war for survival against a horde of zombies – hideous creations of twisted medical science under the control of Dr. Obrero himself!

Video Clumsy: My Moan About “Madman”

In a moonlit forest, on the last night of summer camp, the kids and staff (who, in a move which doesn’t speak well for the camp’s commercial viability, outnumber the kids) sit about a campfire and tell spooky stories. The owner of the camp tells a tale of an old abandoned house nearby – a house haunted by an insatiable axe murderer who was mutilated and hanged by the locals years ago but who escaped death and still stalks the woods to this day, a killer who is inspired to undertake yet another spree whenever someone speaks his name above a whisper, an unstoppable engine of death who looks like an off-brand version of Iron Maiden’s mascot if he put on a bunch of weight and grew a beard – a stalker named Madman Marz.

Naturally, one of the kids takes it on himself to scream “Madman Marz” at the top of his voice and lob a rock through Marz’s house’s window.

Urban legends like Madman Marz are ten-a-penny, of course – more or less every campsite has them, and I remember being creeped out by a very similar story when I went to Scout camp as a kid because I was kind of a wimpy boy and hadn’t watched any of the Friday the 13th movies. There’s a particular area of New York where the local campsite killer urban legend refers to a certain “Cropsey”, who was supposed to haunt an abandoned mental hospital; fairly recently the documentary Cropsey explored the possibility that this particular iteration of the legend might have been inspired by the activities of a real life child kidnapper and alleged murderer from the area named Andre Rand.

Video Clumsy: Don’t Go In the Woods… Alone!

This article was originally published on Ferretbrain. I’ve backdated it to its original Ferretbrain publication date but it may have been edited and amended since its original appearance.

Intellectually speaking, I know for a fact that director James Bryan and his crew didn’t just grab a bunch of random props and kit, stroll off into a forest in the Rocky Mountains, and shoot Don’t Go In the Woods… Alone! on a completely improvised basis. But fuck me, does it do absolutely everything in its power to convince you that that’s exactly what they did. The plot, such as it is, goes like this: random people holidaying in the mountains get murdered by a killer (some sort of dishevelled wild man played by Tom Drury and credited only as “Maniac”) in little vignettes. Interspersed between these vignettes we get what would, in a conventional movie, be our main plots – a group of young hikers strolling around on a walking holiday, and the local sheriff (Ken Carter) and his deputy (David Barth) investigating the mayhem that’s kicking off out in them hills.

Eventually the hikers, the killer, and the lawmen cross paths and something resembling a plot unfolds itself for the viewers’ benefit, but goodness knows the process of getting there is awkward and haphazard. Whilst some filmmakers have been able to do great things with a $20,000 budget, a cast and crew with more enthusiasm than competence, the best you can say about this one is that it’s an absolutely fascinating disaster, with cheap gore effects and bad acting being the order of the day.

Video Clumsy: Evilspeak

This article was originally published on Ferretbrain. I’ve backdated it to its original Ferretbrain publication date but it may have been edited and amended since its original appearance.

The movies identified as “video nasties” by the Department of Public Prosecutions back in the 1980s back in the day are a varied lot. Some have particularly extreme scenes that stand out as being gruesome enough to alarm a conservative 1980s audience, even though as a whole the films in question aren’t too different in premise from well-established fare. Some seem to have been designed to court controversy on a thematic basis. And some seem to be on the list by pure accident, the movies in question being so tacky, cheap, and just plain bad that it’d be hard to imagine anyone taking them seriously at all, let alone setting up a moral panic over them. You could say that these films aren’t so much “video nasties” as “video clumsies”.

One of those “why did the DPP even care?” films is Evilspeak, a B-movie cheap enough that nobody could mistake it for a real snuff movie (as happened with Cannibal Holocaust) and cheesy enough that nobody could mistake it for a film about genuine occult phenomena (which seems to have been the basis for Mary Whitehouse singling out The Evil Dead). I almost suspect that it was added to the list based on a skim-reading of a plot summary.

So, it turns out that a heretical, demon-worshipping sect led by a certain Father Esteban (Richard Moll) was exiled by the Spanish Empire, and ended up being granted land in North America (presumably due to the English crown’s policy at the time of fucking with the Spaniards whenever convenient). Fast forward to the 20th Century, and there’s a modern military academy of the strict-to-the-point-of-fascism variety the USA seem to love built on the land in question – which explains why this academy, with all of its modern buildings, seems to have a medieval dungeon tucked away in the basement.

Said dungeon is discovered by one Stanley Coopersmith (Clint Howard), one of the more awkward students at the academy. Disliked by staff and students alike (in a rather dubious plot point, the only student willing to be friendly to Coopersmith is also more or less the only black student we see), Coopersmith often finds himself on the receiving end of bullying by his peers and officially condoned bullying on the part of the staff; hence spending much of his time on various punishment duties, ranging from slopping out the academy’s small army of carnivorous pigs (yeah, I don’t get why they have the pigs either) to cleaning out the basement under the dubious supervision of the drunken, abusive janitor Sarge (R.G. Armstrong).

It’s during the latter duty that Coopersmith discovers the dungeon, with all the cool loot inside it. Translating Father Esteban’s diary by typing it into a computer (because that’s how computers work), soon enough Coopersmith is holding his own little black masses with the aid of a possessed terminal (because that’s also how computers work), whose graphical capabilities modestly increase once the mass is successful in order to display wacky pentagram animations when the ensuing magical spells and demonic powers kick off (because that, too, is how computers work). As the rest of the academy goes about its business – which seems to involve a weird double standard where the boys wear military uniforms and pretend to do military stuff whilst the girls wear sexy civilian clothes and seem to exist mostly to put on beauty pageants for the boys’ morale – Coopersmith finds himself more and more alienated, and not even the love of a stray puppy he looks after in the dungeon can soothe him. When the main bully clique invades his inner sanctum and mistreat the sweet puppy in question, Coopersmith gets the big guns out, taking down the academy Carrie-style thanks to the all-conquering power of our Lord Satan. (Satan, apparently, is a third-rate wire-fu artist with a fondness for piggies.)

This is a cheap little movie which ticks most of the exploitation formula boxes. You get an assigned dose of nudity when the principal’s secretary has a shower, you have a bit of gore, you have some over-the-top deaths which you can’t take too seriously due to how obvious the special effects are, and you have a plot that doesn’t quite hold together all told. There’s a downright bizarre pig-based subplot, wherein by stealing Esteban’s gemstone-encrusted diary whilst Coopersmith is slopping out the pigs the secretary establishes some sort of weird pig-based connection between the book and the pigs, so when she has her shower scene she’s interrupted by a horde of angry pigs bursting into her house to spirit the book away; at least, they’re meant to be angry, but they’re obviously perfectly calm, happy piggies and the puppet that attacks the secretary in her shower isn’t exactly convincing. This subplot adds nothing to the overall story except running time, and the same is true of a bunch of other strands in the movie.

Overall, the script is rather shaky. In particular, it feels like it’s undergone a bunch of rewrites and retained a number of features from previous versions of the script which are necessary for the story that is told here to take place, but simultaneously don’t make much sense in the context of the story either. A major issue is the way Father Esteban set up his cult in the USA, and then the military academy appeared there, but there doesn’t seem to be any actual connection between the academy and the cult, except the academy has all of the cult’s old shit in its basement, except on the other hand nobody’s ever found that stuff aside from Coopersmith – despite the fact that the current chaplain (played by Joseph Cortese) specifically says that he has an interest in the history of the chapel and the academy buildings in general and has made a point of researching them.

It feels like it would make a lot more sense if some vestige of the cult had survived to the present day within the academy’s administration, perhaps with the reverend being the current leader of the cult, and that the plot would revolve around them trying to manipulate Coopersmith into helping bring back Father Esteban to life (a resurrection hinted at throughout the film but which is only vaguely realised at the end). This would make scenes like the one where the Reverend creepily pops up out of nowhere whilst Coopersmith is trying to report for the start of his basement-clearing duty make much more sense.

Likewise, the movie makes a lot of the computer stuff without the computer ever actually becoming plot-relevant. It performs literally no function which requires it to be present, and it feels like after flailing around for stuff to do with it the director (Eric Weston) gave up and just used the computer to provide a modern aesthetic for some of the Satan stuff. Apparently, the computer bits were latter-day additions to the script, and it really kind of shows, since crucial bits of logistics don’t quite make sense. (In particular, how the hell did Coopersmith manage to steal a school computer and smuggle it down to the basement without anyone at least commenting that an entire terminal has gone missing?)

In short, Evilspeak is a tame, confusing muddle of a horror film undone by a script that doesn’t put a high priority on making internal sense and the failure of cute, adorable piggies to look remotely evil.