It's Absolutely True

A group of attractive college students find themselves caught in a serial killer's meta scheme in 1998's Urban Legend. A successful Scream knock-off, it has a ridiculous plot but is a bit entertaining, featuring a nice cast.

The main cast includes Alicia Witt (Gersten Hayward from Twin Peaks), Jared Leto, Rebecca Gayheart, Tara Reid, Joshua Jackson, and Michael Rosenbaum. An impressive roster of supporting performances includes Brad Dourif, Robert Englund, Natasha Gregson Wagner, and John Neville.

For some reason, I knew early on who the killer was. It wasn't like I figured out, I don't think. I just knew. I must have heard about it somewhere but I have no memory of doing so. Maybe I listened to and half-watched a Rifftrax of the movie. Maybe I actually saw it and somehow just blocked the memory. I was certain who the killer was even as I watched the killer do things that ought to have been physically impossible for the particular performer.

I could make a long list of ridiculous things in the movie. My favourite was Alicia Witt's goth roommate who's chatting with who she thinks is a guy, a potential hookup, on an archaic instant messenger via dial-up modem. It's really the killer, of course. In every scene, this girl wears black lipstick except this scene so she can tell the killer, "I'm going to get ready. What room are you in?" before leaving the computer to go across the hall to the bathroom so she can "get ready", a process that involves the sole task of applying her lipstick. When she returns to her dormroom, a mirror is plainly visible in the background. When she sits back down to her computer, the reply is of course, "YOURS". Too bad she didn't have to apply eyeliner, she might've gone all the way to a salon for that.

X Sonnet #1821

Considered plops of cream were sour thoughts.
Replace electric grills to make a light.
A quiet day displaced the talking bots.
A fuzzy tape replaced a bluer sight.
Ignore the pudding name it's really jam.
For making little hill you get a peak.
Upon the sandwich find the porker's ham.
The city mouths proclaim the soundly meek.
With no reflection, words were left to dry.
Contagion blooms for cagey light above.
A watching ghost was cruel and forced a cry.
The hand would scratch and tear its pretty glove.
Without a watch, the pocket tightens guts.
The river's lined with grim and creepy huts.

Thanksgiving in January

Now, that's what I call a feel good movie. 2023's Thanksgiving is the bloody holiday slasher with notes of satire I needed. It was very hard to stop smiling while watching it.

This is the latest film to come from 2007's Grindhouse, which at this point must be one of the most successful unsuccessful movies of all time. Originally a double feature consisting of Robert Rodriguez's Planet Terror and Quentin Tarantino's Death Proof, it also featured several fake trailers for films inspired by exploitation films of the 1970s. There was a trailer for Machete by Robert Rodriguez which he ended up making into two movies, there was Werewolf Women of the SS by Rob Zombie (the weakest of the lot), Don't by Edgar Wright (very funny), and, finally, the unexpected cream of the crop, Thanksgiving by Eli Roth.

It has to be said, the feature film is nowhere near as extreme as the trailer. There's really no nudity (aside from one bare bottom), no weird sex gags, and the giant Indian head was removed from the parade which now consists entirely of pilgrims, much like the Thanksgiving stuff on Wednesday. Isn't it interesting how political correctness has erased Native Americans from the holiday?

It's kind of sad, all these pilgrims, dressed up and waiting for their Indian dinner dates who will never arrive.

But as was suggested in RedLetterMedia's review of the film, I think 2023's Thanksgiving may be meant to be a 21st century remake of the faux '70s movie shown in the trailer. So it's not meant to be counted among grindhouse movies now but among 2020s slashers, which are careful to avoid sensitive political issues and sex even as they're willing to indulge in extravagant gore and torture.

Eli Roth is a big fan (and former collaborator) of David Lynch (he even made his own Twin Peaks knock-off show, Hemlock Grove). Like Twin Peaks, Thanksgiving presents us with a cast of small town characters, any of whom could be the killer, and Roth teases us with various clues. When the killer's identity is revealed, it's pretty satisfying and makes a lot of sense, even though I didn't guess it.

The beginning of the film is a brilliant mix of mounting tension and dark humour worthy of Hitchcock. A Black Friday (beginning, of course, on Thursday night) steadily goes from rough and ominous to baroquely catastrophic. Roth's sense of timing and detail is impeccable. Especially memorable is the man in the crowd who cuts his throat on a piece of broken glass when he's shoved through a broken door. Of course, his life's blood oozing away, he still staggers to the coveted waffle irons.

I wish I could've seen this movie in November but, I must say, it was so magical it took me back in time. I felt like it was Thanksgiving when I was watching it. Thank you, Eli Roth.

Stabbing Follows Burning

A summer camp caretaker is horrifically burned after a prank pulled by teenage boys goes wrong in 1981's The Burning. He leaves the hospital permanently disfigured and decides to take his revenge . . . on a prostitute. For a guy whose life was ruined by boys, he spends a surprising amount of time going after girls. His arch enemy turns out to be a nerdy peeping tom and this might be a good time to mention Harvey Weinstein conceived the story. But a lot of other people were involved, too. The director, Tony Maylam, is competent and cinematographer Harvey Harrison is surprisingly talented. And the performances are all good down the line, much better than the typical '80s slasher.

The Burning marks the film debuts of Jason Alexander and Holly Hunter, though Hunter's barely in the film. Alexander at least accompanies the ill-fated teens canoeing up the river where the killer, Cropsy (Lou David), starts to massacre them with a pair of gardening shears.

He gets around to murdering some boys, too, but he starts out focusing on the girls. This choice is never explained

It's an ensemble cast but by the last act the main protagonist works out to be Alfred (Brian Backer), a teen we're introduced to peeping on one of the girls in the shower. Another character, Glazer (Larry Joshua), is introduced as kind of a bully who threatens to beat Alfred up and I think we're meant to hate him but I found him the most appealing character in the movie. The movie seems to assume we sympathise with Alfred, though, and even if I didn't know Harvey Weinstein came up with this story--and that he's prone to self-pity about his pathetic history with women--I still don't think I'd have liked Alfred. He's "corrupt without being charming" to borrow a phrase from Oscar Wilde.

The makeup effects by Tom Savini are pretty good and there are some good jump scares.

The Burning is available on Shudder until the end of the month.

The Party is Pleasant

Women in their 20s playing teenagers gather at night while an insane serial killer is on the loose. You can guess what happens next in 1982's Slumber Party Massacre, a slasher film in the heyday of slasher films. This one bears the distinction of being written, directed, and produced by women and, perhaps for this reason, there's no coyness or nervous energy about its titillating elements. That is nice and the film is altogether easy to watch but ultimately it may be a little too comfortable. It never manages to generate a real sense of anxiety or any especially exciting sexual energy.

Originally conceived as a feminist parody of the slasher genre by screenwriter Rita Mae Brown, it was made into a more sincere horror film by director/producer Amy Holden Jones. It retains a post-modern, tongue-in-cheek quality signaled immediately in the first scene of the protagonist, Trish (Michelle Michaels), waking up at home. She's listening to a radio show in which a woman winning a contest asks how much money the prize is--and replies with an angry, "What?!" when she's informed that the prize is a free t-shirt.

Later, during the titular slumber party, the only scene of guys peeping at girls is constructed with deliberate artificiality. Moments after the two guys approach the open window, the girls immediately gather into easy view and start undressing. The window frame emphasises the self-awareness of the film as a film designed for men to enjoy. As usual for post-modernism, what may have been intended as profound or intelligent is really just redundant. Yep, we're watching a movie, all right.

The killer, with the obviously significant name of "Russ Thorn" (Michael Villella), gets an obviously phallic weapon, a power drill. He's a particularly weak villain--the actor is never very expressive but he's never inexpressive enough to be a creepy Michael Myers type.

Trish starts the film by throwing away some dolls, obviously a symbolic coming of age gesture to which the film is obviously responding with the hideous rite of passage of an encounter with demented masculinity. But the film's heart is in the right place, putting a clear dividing line between healthy sexual play--such as the gratuitous nudity in a slasher film--and the mental aberration of a man whose fetish involves genuine harm to women. It's a shame the film couldn't manage to be as exciting as it was evidently game for being.

The Slumber Party Massacre is available on Shudder.

When Maniacs Collide

A man wearing a big rubber mask holds a hammer over Ellie Masters where she lies in bed, staring confusedly back at him before finally screaming. The cruel matron of the orphanage where Ellie is staying explains this is only a dream in 1971's Blood and Lace, a captivating and schlocky riff on Psycho with a theremin-heavy soundtrack oddly pulled from Sci-Fi films. This only scratches the surface of this famous pulp film's free-associative plot which also includes frozen corpses that bleed, at least four murderous maniacs occasionally at cross purposes, and a whole lot of really short dresses and nighties. It's hard to take your eyes off this movie, it's a terrific pleasure.

The Wikipedia entry calls Blood and Lace a proto-slasher film. Like later slasher films, it takes some conspicuous cues from Psycho. Blood and Lace focuses on a pretty young blonde woman, Ellie (Melody Patterson), before introducing an unrelated maniac, Mrs. Deere (Gloria Grahame), who routinely turns to her dead husband for advice on how to run her orphanage.

I suspect this movie had a substantial influence on David Lynch. Ellie looks and behaves so much like Naomi Watts in Mulholland Drive it's uncanny--and I'd be spoiling both movies if I told you why the resemblance doesn't end there. The film starts with the murder of Ellie's mother, a prostitute, and one of her mother's johns. For this sequence, director Philip S. Gilbert introduces the novel technique of attaching a hammer to the camera, offering us a first person "hammer cam", if you will.

In the aftermath, Ellie has been temporarily committed to a hospital in her lacy nightie but she argues with a social worker named Mullins (Milton Selzer), insisting she be allowed to leave so she can seek out her biological father. The fact that she knows virtually nothing about him doesn't seem to discourage her.

Managing to sneak out of the hospital, she's immediately pursued by a strange man (Vic Tayback) who doesn't think to mention he's a police detective until after she's run off the road and along the train tracks for a while. There are a lot of logical problems in this film but there actually turns out to be sort of an explanation for this later on.

He informs her she needs to go live in an orphanage. Ahead of this, we're introduced to Mrs. Deere and her henchman, Tom (Len Lesser), who cuts off a boy's hand when he attempts to flee the place. We also have a glimpse of Tom's and Mrs. Deere's routine of moving corpses out of the freezer and into beds in order to pass inspections by Mullins. He doesn't look too closely at things due to a tacit understanding he has with Mrs. Deere who sleeps with him in exchange.

There's a scene later in the film where Mrs. Deere talks to Ellie about remembering what it was like to be beautiful and warns Ellie that one day she'll look in a mirror and see someone like her. But Gloria Grahame, who was 46 at this point, actually looks really good. I'd say her performance is more animated, too, than in The Man Who Never Was though she still has the almost totally paralysed upper lip.

Ellie discovers a girl tied up in the attic, begging for water--a victim of Mrs. Deere's brutal discipline, but Ellie doesn't think to mention it when the police detective drops by. The detective, whose name is Calvin, is shown in an earlier scene reminiscing with Mullins about how nice it was sleeping with Ellie's prostitute mother and talking about how much he'd like to get into Ellie's pants now. At the same time, he does seem genuinely interested in getting to the bottom of shenanigans at the Deere Orphanage.

Which all leaves the question, who is the man in the mask with the bright red and black shirt, wielding the hammer? He looks like an ancestor of both Freddy Krueger and Leatherface. Also, why does Mrs. Deere like to talk about reanimating corpses?

This movie is so much better than I was expecting it to be and it's available on Amazon Prime.

Twitter Sonnet #1267

Selected cats perform the martial role.
Along the wall the tabbies claw the stone.
A crenelated glimpse revealed the soul.
The fastest paw acquired nip alone.
A tower guard's asleep in iron helm.
A whisker set detects an arrow's path.
To save a kitten, cats reclaim the realm.
Or mug or glass provokes the paw to wrath.
The brave and bristly troop prepares.
A team of tails arrays atop the wall.
But hark: a bigger cat appears.
A secret puma stands and swipes them all.
The snarling foe attacks a squeaking bait
As coiled storms of fur in boxes wait.