Slasher
Halloween Bloodbath
It seems like I haven’t really had enough horror films featured on Chopping Mall lately. Which is a shame: horror films are really what this blog is all about. Even the name comes from a horror film. Perhaps there’s no better time than Halloween to catch up on some splatters, slashers and spooks. So here is Chopping Mall’s extra special Halloween Bloodbath Horror Film review! Here we go….
Aerobicide
Now this was really quite something. It’s a while since I’ve watched anything that screamed 80s any louder than this. In fact, I’m not sure I’ve ever seen anything more 80s. This is a film set in an aerobics class, with pumping disco music throughout, enormous haircuts, occasional moustaches and lots of lycra. This could almost be a museum piece: look at what people wore in those days!
Once you get over the disco beat, though, this is pretty standard slasher fare. The film is set in and around Rhonda’s Gymnasium. Sadly, Rhonda’s place seems to be plagued by murders. A woman is stabbed in the shower. Things go bump in the night. Etc. We get the usual crew: a slightly creepy police man who could be capable of murder; a slightly creepy strapping-handsome-gym-beefcake who could be capable of murder; some ditsy ladies who clearly aren’t capable of very much apart from aerobic and squealing; Rhonda and a creepy lecherous idiot guy who we’re clearly supposed to suspect as the murderer but patently isn’t.
It’s not really very much fun. The gore is disappointingly minimal - although the stabbing in the shower isn’t bad - the fight scenes are hilariously awful (complete with video-game-esque THWACK sounds), the acting isn’t much better and the plot is nothing if not predictable. But perhaps I’m being too hard on this one: it’s not without it’s charm. I’d imagine that after a few beers, or just put on as background noise, this wouldn’t be so bad.
Bikini Girls on Ice
I saw this listed as one of those “so bad you will not believe your eyes” titles and …oh boy… it certainly was. BGoI is clearly one of the many victims of the “good name - crap film” syndrome that plagues modern B-movies (See Mega Shark vs Giant Octopus. Or, rather, don’t). But how could this be? How could you go wrong with a title like Bikini Girls on Ice? What kind of idiot would you have to be to screw that up.
Sadly, screw it up they did. BGoI - which is sadly not about ice-skating women - follows a handful of women who, whilst on their (apparently very long) way to a bikini-car-wash fundraiser, break down at an abandoned garage. Blah, blah, the usual business. There is, of course, some murderous psychopath lurking in said abandoned garage who picks off the stranded visitors one by one. At first they assume that the missing people have just wandered off but, once they’ve found some body parts, they realise they’re living through a nightmare. Blah blah blah.
Seriously. This was astonishingly dull. Not only did it have absolutely no sense of tension or surprise (you absolutely knew what was going to happen ages before it did) but they completely forgot to create a convincing explanation for why the killer was killing! It’s not even like I have high standards - the eventual motive in Aerobicide is rubbish - but I do expect at least a gesture at a decent motive. That’s really what a slasher is all about: without an explanation of the killer’s motive, a slasher becomes just a string of pointless death scenes. To get away with that, you’d have to at least make those death scenes really spectacular. Sadly, these ones aren’t.
Ultimately, Bikini Girls on Ice makes 80minutes feel like a very long time and gives little by way of entertainment.
Killdozer
Aaaand finally: here’s something to really get excited about. Killdozer, also blessed with a brilliant name, manages to live up to it. I would call this a by-numbers killer-vehicle-terrorising-everyone flick, but I’m not sure there even is a by-numbers layout for this …er… niche genre.
There’s surprisingly little to say about it: conveniently cut-off from the rest of the world on an island in the middle of god-knows-where, a small team of basically unlikeable construction workers find themselves unexpectedly terrorised by one of their own bulldozers. Most of the film follows the machine picking them off one-by-one until they really begin to get it together and fight back.
It’s absolutely as silly as it sounds. What sets it apart from disappointing modern killer-object movies (like Rubber) is that they play it absolutely dead straight. There isn’t even a hint of smug, self-aware laughter here. They must have been sniggering on set but none of it carries into the film. If only more silly horror would take itself so seriously. Great fun.
Phew. All done. Let’s go and watch Beetle Juice now?
Driller Killer (or "The Trouble With a Reputation")
Abel Ferrara’s Driller Killer is a film far better known for its reputation than for its content. For those that don’t know, the film is a slasher flick from the US in 1979 and gained it’s level of notoriety in Britain in the early 1980s when it was included in the Director of Public Prosecutions list of films to be charged under obscenity laws. This list became known as the “video nasties” and would eventually prompt the creation of the UK’s Video Recording Act 1984, a piece of law that, for the first time, meant it was a legal requirement to have any video sold in the UK approved by the BBFC (the UK film regulatory office).
Driller Killer, available unrated on VHS at the time was promptly banned. It was not approved for release by the BBFC until 1999, some 15 years later.
All this excitement does, of course, make it a ‘must-watch’ for any self-respecting lover of trashy, gorey, sleazy cinema. Sadly, the film itself isn’t very good. And let’s be honest: my standards are pretty damn low!
Let’s start with some plot; Reno is a struggling artist living in New York. He does some moderately good paintings and gets the occaisonal comission but is having some difficulty making ends meet and paying the rent is becoming a pressing issue. And then blah blah blah stuff happens and he turns into a psycho with a drill. It’s hardly riveting stuff.
But we weren’t watching it for the plot were we? We were watching it for the DRILLING! The KILLING! The depraved mess that saw it banned for 15 years from shops in the UK. As might be expected, time has not treated this shock factor well; we see more and bloodier films all the time, a slope that leads Abel Ferrara’s sick and twisted video nasty looking like a film we might catch on evening television. Yeah there’re a couple of fairly powerful scenes (I’m thinking the drill in the tramps forehead…) but it’s hardly the stuff nightmares are made of and it’s hard to imagine it having a corrupting effect on anyone really - video nasties were blamed for violence in the 80s as much as violent computer games are today.
The most damning thing you can say about this film is that, far from being especially good or bad, far from being impressively depraved or tame, this is really quite middle-of-the-road. I wanted to love it, I wanted it to live up to its reputation but I came away feeling vaguely disappointed.
Angel Blade
The last thing I posted here (see below) was a rant/argument about how the “b” in “b-movie” didn’t mean bad. Sadly, as is so often the way when you try to make an argument, the next thing to come along so totally undermined my point that I’d have quite happily pretended it didn’t exist. But I shan’t, if only because admitting that there are exceptions to any argument is a good thing to do.
That next thing that came along was Angel Blade.
[WARNING! SPOILER ALERT! THIS REVIEW REVEALS THE PLOT OF THE FILM]
Now, I’ll be straight about this from the begining; I bought Angel Blade on DVD for £0.99 at the nearest er… 99p shop. So I’ll admit that I wasn’t necessarily expecting a masterpiece (although I did pick up a couple of Dario Argento films there too… Wine some, lose some). And masterpiece it most certainly wasn’t.
I would have no hesitation in naming Angel Blade as one of the worst films I have watched in recent memory.
The creative ’team’ doesn’t exactly bode well. From the “Deavid Heavener Entertainment Group” comes a film that is written by David Heavener, produced by David Heavener, directed by David Heavener and starring David Heavener. The guy has taken the role of the auteur to a higher degree. You feel it was only really physical impossibility that stopped him giving himself all the other parts in the film. Oh yeah, and the fact that his (and only his) numerous sex-scenes wouldn’t have been as fun for him to write/direct/star in if there wasn’t anyone else around…
I’m getting ahead of myself though. I’ll go back to the premise of the film. A mysterious killer is murdering prostitutes in LA. So far so good. Anyone who’s seen Franco’s New York Ripper or indeed pretty much anything made in Italy between 1960 and 1980 can tell you that this is a fine starting point for a film. It guarrantees you a good dose of sleeze, gore, intrigue and action. Perfect. Who could mess this one up?
David Heavener, that’s who.
By null at 2010-03-30
The plot manages to be both confusing and dull, the sex scenes bear very little relation to the film - more like sexual interludes than actual scenes - and the ‘astonishing’ secret of the film is laughable. (Oh yes, here come the spoilers…) Not content with merely being writer/producer/director/lead policeman character, David Heavener’s character is also the psycho killer. His reasons? Just wait and see… (drumroll) The reason that David Heavener, once-good cop, has gone on a pregnant-prostitute killing rampage in LA is because… his pregnant girlfriend/wife walked off a roof and died.
Yes.
I’ll write that again. The reason that David Heavener, once-good cop, has gone on a pregnant-prostitute killing rampage in LA is because… his pregnant girlfriend/wife walked off a roof and died. It wasn’t that she was killed in the line of duty. It wasn’t that she was even killed at all. She was looking through the viewfinder of her camera and, in perhaps the most implausible moment in cinema history, she walked. off. the. roof. of. a. building. Splat.
Oh dear.
If however, all this gives the impression that I didn’t enjoy this film, you’re very much mistaken. Cinematic genius apart, Angel Blade is a stunning example of just how badly you can tell a nonsense story and, as such, is totally worth a watch! I might leave it a while until a second viewing though…
Microwave Massacre
Oh dear, here we go again. I definitely don’t plan to make this the norm, but I’m afraid that this is my second spoiler filled post. I think I can justify it again though. With Underwater City, I didn’t feel to bad about giving spoilers as 1)You will probably never see it 2)If the opportunity does arise, you should probably turn it down. Forewarned is forearmed, afterall, and Underwater City isn’t a particularly attractive prospect.
Here, it’s a somewhat different case, as Microwave Massacre is really an awful lot of fun. I think I can still get away with spoilers though as 1)You will probably never see it (it’s out-of-print, though copies are floating around on ebay) and 2)Knowing what happens really won’t spoil your enjoyment of this great-fun low-budget cannibalistic slasher.
So here we go. This post will be somewhat heavier on pictures than words as they really do most of the talking for themselves. Infact, this is less of a review than just telling the story. I’m sorry. But I can promise that telling the story will make you want to watch it far more than a review ever could!
The story revolves around Donald, a middle-aged construction worker. Poor Donald is just an average guy really; he likes the simple things - he works, he has a beer and then he goes home to his wife for some good ol’ home-cooked American food. Except, just his wife, since buying a super new microwave only wants to cook exotic foreign dishes. Stand-up rows over “food you can’t pronounce” ensue and Donald gets more and more miserable.
So far, so normal. At this stage the film really is showing very little promise. The dialogue is clunky to say the least and nothing much is happening. Donald’s exchanges with his (younger, hipper) co-workers are fairly funny but nothing much to shout about. They do slip in a brilliant visual gag though… as Donald’s work-mates get out their humble foil-wrapped sandwhiches, Donald fishes in his cool-box for the lunch his wife has prepared him: an entire crab in a massive bap!
With tension rising, you just know something’s going to break, and break it does. After getting perhaps a little too drunk, Donald returns home in a rage and drunkenly kills his wife. Whoops.
At this point the movie is still distinctly so-so. We’re a good chunk through and there’s no hint of a massacre, the microwave is only lurking in the corner and you could perhaps feel a little cheated. But persevere! as things are about to get a whole lot better.
Being a little bit inexperienced at this murdering lark, Donald cuts her up into pieces, sticks her in the fridge and is content to forget about her for a bit.
Completely by accident however, Donald mixes up the left-over food from the fridge and finds himself munching on a piece of his late wife. Even more surprising is that she tastes pretty good! Once over his initial revulsion, Donald tucks in quite happily and soon begins eating her for every meal …. including lunch at work.
Donald’s co-workers agree that the meat is pretty good; by this point the film’s great fun. Watching Donald and his work-mates tucking into chunks of human flesh is begining to give us something of what the film promised. Still not really a massacre though….
Oh wait, here we go! Running low on surplies and very conscious that his wife is rather tough as meat goes, Donald soon begins to solicit girls on the street and bring them home. Once there, they all seem a little puzzled by how little desire he shows for them. What they don’t realise until too late is that it’s not so much their bodies that Donald is interested in as their flesh! He chops, slices, dices and microwaves. Then shares it with his - now much friendlier - work-mates.
I shall leave the (slightly lacklustre) ending not entirely spoiled; although I think you know by now more or less what you’re in for.
It’s a fun film and, at 76 minutes, I’d recommend it unreservedly. Although a little slow to get going and boasting some astonishingly wooden acting, this film is a lot of fun - and be honest: you’re not going to let bad acting put you off low-budget campy horror are you? Sometimes, when watching decidedly low-brow, low-budget films there is a tendency to wonder “how did it ever seem a good idea to make this?”. By the end of Microwave Massacres though, I’m sure you’ll be wondering how it could ever seem like a good idea NOT to make this. Flawed, cheap and trashy, Microwave Massacres is a triumph of b-movie cinema.
The trailer here happily labels it the “worst horror film ever”!
(I tell a lie: it isn’t entirely out of print and is infact available from Anthem DVD in the USA, looks like there was never a Region 2 DVD though)
Wicked Wicked
From film diary
Challenge your imagination? That might be a little optimistic…
This is quite a weird one. As you can see from any of the pictures, Wicked Wicked is a film based entirely around the gimmick of duo-vision. Yep, that’s two screens at once. Mostly they’re different angles of the same scene but sometimes they show wildly different things: a character pauses for thought whilst a flashback plays out on the the other side.
The sad thing is that the gimmick actually works pretty well and is dragged down by a god-awful plot. In some moments, with the killer hiding on one screen and the others looking for him on the other screen, the two screens device really does actually add a bit of tension.
Kinves!
They can talk on the phone between screens
Sadly, the story is rubbish, the acting pretty laughable and the pacing even worse. It’s only 90ish minutes long; it really shouldn’t drag like it does.
That said, the first 20 minutes or so are pretty good and the last 20 are really good fun. It’s just the middle 50 that crawl past… It suffers from being one of those slasher flicks with very little slashing.
Although the killer has a bit of a thing for stabbing blondes, and mostly just after they’ve come from the shower, the film isn’t sexy in the slightest. This doesn’t stop it producing what is possibly an all time classic line though: the secretary lady, who is having a bit of a fling with the doctor/dentist/security man slyly says:
“I think I feel another toothache coming on, Doctor…”
“Sorry love, I’m not drilling today”
(Well it made me laugh anyway…)
Mostly crap. Fun at the end.
How moody…
Fake blood to the face!
Fairly impressively the trailer below, though it makes a fuss at the start about “Duo-Vision” doesn’t actually show any of the parallel screens. How odd…