Any Takers For “Spring Breakers” ?

Posted on March 28, 2013 by Ryan C. (fourcolorapocalypse)

So, we’ve finally discovered what it takes for Harmony Korine to go mainstream — a couple of established stars, a little T&A, and hey! — he’s in the club. Hell, he can even manage to get himself invited onto Letterman outta the deal — although apparently he can’t stick around for long. Still, the fact remains — long (hell, decades) after you’d given up on the very notion it would ever happen, Hollywood has opened its doors to the guy who gave us Gummo, Julien Donkey-Boy, and Trash Humpers. And truth be told, he didn’t have to dumb down his sensibilities all that much in the process.

Okay, yeah — Spring Breakers is full of Girls Gone Wild-type footage of hot young flesh parading around in bikinis (or less), muscle-heads partying in jock straps, beer bongs being poured on impossibly tight stomachs, impromptu lesbian make-out sessions, yadda yadda yadda. But it’s piled on so thick and so repetitiously that there’s no way Korine can possibly be engaging in anything but parody of the Bacchanalian subculture he’s depicting. The film never takes itself too seriously, even when it ventures into some pretty dark territory, and it seems to me that our guy Harmony is sending a none-too-sly message to the Tinseltown suits who previously wouldn’t have touched his work with a 50-foot pole : “this is what you want? Okay. But we’re doing it my way.”

And frankly, that “way” hasn’t changed much — the ultra-naturalistic hand-held camerawork, hallucinatory pacing and editing, and free-from improvisation (as usual, the story per se here doesn’t seem to follow any set “script” as you or I understand the term and appears mostly to consist of the actors getting into character and then ad-libbing from there) of his earlier efforts remains, and the end result is more akin to a series of “found footage” snippets pieced together pretty haphazardly than anything else. The setting may be different this time around, but the basic Korine modus operandi is essentially the same.

In short, if you’ve been following this guy’s career over the course of the pas couple of decades, you’ll only think you’re getting into something different with Spring Breakers, but by the time Ellie Goulding’s “Lights” plays over the end credits, there’s no doubt that this work fits in very comfortably with the rest of his directorial oeuvre. Think Trash Humpers in bikinis, or Gummo with “hotties” rather than genetic rejects, and you won’t be too far off thSo, here’s the deal — four friends (Selena Gomez, Vanessa Hudgens, Ashley Benson and Korine’s wife, Rachel) at a piece of shit college in piece of shit Kentucky are bored out of their minds and want to go down to St. Pete to live it up over Spring Break. There’s just one problem — they don’t have enough money. In order to alleviate that situation, three of them (Gomez’s character — named, appropriately enough, Faith — a devoutly religious young woman most of the time sits it out) decide to pull a heist at a local fast-food chicken stand using those purportedly realistic-looking squirt guns the cops are always telling us fooled ’em whenever they shoot some poor kid who was holding one dead. They get away with it and head down for a week of sun, fun, sex, booze, and drugs — but they don’t get away with that, because they’re busted at a party that gets out of hand. Don’t fret too much, though, friends, as they aren’t forced to cool their heels in jail for very long. A local dope dealer/wannabe-rapper who goes by the handle of Alien (James Franco, doing his best impression of Gary Oldman in True Romance , just substitute hip-hop for reggae) takes a liking to them when he sees them in court and bails ’em out en masse. Does he have ulterior motives? Of course, and watching him use pimp-like “turning out” psychological manipulation on the ladies in order to seduce them into into being hench-women in his pot-selling-and-armed-robbery enterprise (his only other “employees” are two identical twin brothers that Korine taps from the low end of that gene pool he’s always wading in ) is both creepy and cool at the same time.

That being said, Alien’s not a one-dimensional character (even though most of the girls, frankly, are) and he does seem to develop a genuine emotional bond with his new recruits. Faith doesn’t fall for his shtick and hops a bus home, but the rest are in. And that, of course, is where the troubles really begin.

Korine follows a pretty delicate balancing act the rest of the way — he eschews standard “don’t aim higher than your station in life or it’ll end in tears” morality-play-style sermonizing even though the material could be played that way pretty easily, while simultaneously upping the ante on the over-the-top-ness of it all in a manner so sly that you almost don’t even notice that it’s happening. The ladies get Alien to fellate a gun silencer and it feels perfectly natural, fer cryin’ out loud! But what the hell, they all appeared before the judge in nothing but their bikinis a few short scenes ago, so anything goes here, right?

The final shoot-’em-up at the end, at which point another of the former-foursome has made her way northward after taking a bullet in the arm, does in fact strain credulity a bit, but by then the ethos of the film —in short, presenting the blatantly absurd in the most free-form, unforced manner possible — is so firmly established that, even if you don’t exactly buy it, you don’t mind it. The flick’s firing on all its admittedly warped cylinders, and your choices are either go with the flow or pull your hair out. Since I don’t have all that much hair left, the decision is a pretty simple one.

I suppose, at the end of the day, there will be those who go into this thing for no other reason than to see three-and four-way sex or former “Disney Girls” gone bad. If that’s your thing, fair enough — but I have to warn you, if that’s what put your butt in the seat, you’re destined to head for the exits scratching your head, even though the film delivers everything you want to see in even more ample proportion than you’d probably been expecting. The rest of us? We’ll have thoroughly enjoyed a movie that’s never as stupid as it pretends to be.

“Alienator” : Fred Olen Ray Gives “The Terminator” A Sex Change

Posted on March 26, 2013 by Ryan C. (fourcolorapocalypse)

Give Fred Olen Ray credit — the guy’s a survivor. While his name has never been attached to a genuine B-movie classic — although Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers definitely has its fans — he’s found a way to remain, if not exactly relevant, at least employed for decades now and has , according to official IMDB totals, written 56 films, produced 80, starred in 143, and directed a staggering 128! Granted, directing 128 movies isn’t nearly as difficult as it sounds when most have two-or three-day production schedules, but still —

Anyway, Fred seems to be settling comfortably into the tail end of his career now helming SyFy network made-for-TV numbers and “Skinemax” fare such as Busty Housewives Of Beverly Hills, but back in the late ’80s/early ’90s the straight-to-video market was wide open territory for low-budget mavens such as himself and he was more than willing to help blaze the magnetic tape trail once the celluloid one he’d been treading previously dried and crinkled up with the demise of the drive-ins and downtown exploitation houses that had helped put food on his table (and we’ll get back to gastronomic analogies at the end of this review, just you wait and see!). A true visionary never gives up, he just gives it his best in another venue, right?

Unfortunately, even Fred’s best was never all that great, and the movie in our proverbial crosshairs today, 1990’s Alienator is far from his best indeed, although you’d never know it based on its drop-dead awesome premise, to wit : a supposedly evil intergalactic criminal genius/madman named Kol (Ross Hagen) is about to be executed on a distant spaceship-prison thingie but , of course, manages to affect a semi-daring escape in a shuttle that eventually crash-lands in a forest on Earth. There he makes friendly with a park ranger (who’s got the park ranger-iest name you’ll ever come across), Ward Armstrong (John Phillip Law) and a bunch of annoying teenagers, but little do Kol and his new-found comrades suspect that the spaceship commander (named, simply, “Commander,” and played by Jan-Michael “anything for a buck” Vincent) from whose deadly clutches he managed to free himself has sent a Terminator-esque super-tracker after him, the ultra-deadly — and titular — Alienator herself!

Yes, I said herself — the Alienator, you see, is played by a female ( I think, at any rate, although it wouldn’t surprise me if she had some chromosomal issues going on, and I wouldn’t bet on her ability to pass an Olympic-style genetic screening test) bodybuilder who went by the snappy one-word name of Teagan at this, the apex (such as it was) of her career. She’s basically a cyborg — or maybe android, I never could tell the the difference — chick in a metal bikini who is damn hard to kill and displays, as you’d expect, the emotional range and affect of, say, a walnut. A single-minded killing machine with what appears for all intents and purposes to be a giant pair of binoculars on her boobs, arms that are thicker than my legs, and legs that are thicker than the trunk of the tree in my backyard. Are you afraid yet? You should be — but not so much of the Alienator her(him? it?)self as the unfortunate movie that bears her name.

I know, I know — you read about it on paper (or, as the case may be, your computer screen) and think to yourself “my God, how can you go wrong here?,” but trust me, friends, you can — this flick is a drag. All the actors play it disarmingly straight when by all rights they should be hamming things up, the pacing is dull as toasted rye, and the special effects aren’t good enough to be — well, good — but aren’t bad enough to be hysterical. In short, it’s all an exercise in sleepwalking, “get-it-in-the-can”-style movie-making, and can barely hold your interest despite the fact that by all rights it sure should given its appealingly blatant absurdity.

Still, if you’re in the (entirely advisable under most circumstances) habit of ignoring me, you can check it out for yourself as Alienator came out last week on DVD from Shout! Factory as part of their new “4 Action-Packed Movie Marathon” two-disc set where it shares billing with another early-90s DTV number from Ray, the Heather Thomas (yeah, I forgot about her, too) “starring” vehicle Cyclone, as well as the pretty-decent-all-things-considered Gary Busey revenge flick Eye Of The Tiger and fan favorite Cannon actioner Exterminator 2. The technical specs for Alienator are as follows : digitally remastered (and darn good) widescreen transfer, remastered mono sound, and no extras. Which is fine, really, especially since this package retails on Amazon for eight bucks.

Look, we might as well be honest here —odds are that if you’re gonna get this thing it’s for Exterminator 2 (I know that’s why I picked it up) so anything else is literally (okay, metaphorically — told you we’d get back to that) just gravy, but ya know, sometimes turkey (or beef, or chicken, or whatever) tastes better plain, and Alienator is a cinematic condiment you can definitely skip and still get more than your money’s worth out of the main entree on offer here.

Which is kind of a shame, really, because it sure sounded good on the menu.

“The Las Vegas Serial Killer” Goes Back To A Dry Well

Posted on March 21, 2013 by Ryan C. (fourcolorapocalypse)

As we painstakingly established around these parts a few days back, The Hollywood Strangler Meets The Skid Row Slasher was not exactly Ray Dennis Steckler’s finer hour (okay, hour and ten minutes). It’s a definite head-scratcher of a movie, to be sure, but as mind-bogglingly weird as Steckler’s idea to shoot a silent slasher flick on a budget of $1,000 in 1979 was, that decision seems positively logical in comparison to his decision to actually make a sequel to said silent $1,000 slasher flick seven years later!

Still, in 1986, for reasons known only to the the pseudonymous “Cash Flagg” himself, that’s exactly what he did. Sort of. I think.

The setup here is, as you might expect, something of a puzzler in spite of its simplicity. Pierre Agostino is back as our strangler, but he’s called “Johnathan Glick” rather than “Johnathan Click,” and his stomping grounds have changed from Tinseltown to Sin City. He’s let out of the joynt on the flimsiest technicality you can possibly imagine — they never found any bodies, so his convictions for a series of murders are all overturned — and he hits the streets again and starts killing.

Now, that might seem to make sense apart from the inexplicable swapping of the C in the character’s last name for a G, but that’s really just the tip of the iceberg. What’s he doing in prison in Nevada when his kill-spree took place in California, for instance? And, oh yeah — what he even doing alive, since he was murdered by the Skid Row Slasher at the end of the last one?

You begin to see the problem here. But “problems” are a relative concept, I suppose, and the logical gaps in the story’s basic premise are absolutely nothing compared to the problems in this film’s pacing and execution.

Steckler, here operating once again under his “Wolfgang Schmidt” nom de plume, has opted, no surprise at this point, to shoot the proceedings without sound — but instead of just telling the whole story via voice-over narration, he’s dubbed in actual, honest-to-goodness dialgoue in this one, and it’s never synched up even close to properly. Not that it really matters, because no one’s saying anything interesting — and nothing interesting is happening, either, with Click/Glick/whatever cruising downtown Vegas, the Strip, and neighborhood streets for ladies to choke with his bare hands. It’s, as you’ve no doubt come to expect, a pretty drawn out and tedious affair, and the killings themselves, when they do finally happen after interminable set-up periods, are all uniformly blase and aggressively nondescript.

Then we’ve got the subplot about two low-rent hoodlums who stand around making cat-calls at women, snatching their purses, and taking long lunch breaks. They always seem to show up in roughly the same locales as G(C)lick, and at roughly the same times, but their importance — and I use that term very loosely, trust me — to the goings-on isn’t fully explained until very nearly the end, at which point you’ll have long since stopped giving a shit, and this little “revelatory twist” is so underwhelming that it would almost be insulting if you weren’t so begrudingly impressed at Steckler’s bravado for thinking he could get away with an “explanation” so lame.

Unleashed on a by-and-large uncaring populace via the straight-to-VHS route, The Las Vegas Serial Killer is, naturally, available on DVD these days (it’s presented full-frame with mono sound, both of which are, I guess, adequate enough all things considered), and while Media Blasters, under their Guilty Pleasures sublabel, have given us a nice (-r than this flick deserves) set of extras, including an on-camera interview with the director and a full-length commentary track where he opines at length on the making of the production, at the end of the day it still makes no sense, simply because all the explanation in the world couldn’t begin to shine any light on why this was made and who Steckler thought his audience was.

Shit, I’ve seen this thing a few times now, and I’m still none the wiser. Is it a sequel to The Hollywood Strangler Meets The Skid Row Slasher? Is Agostino playing the exact same guy? How did he manage to survive when it sure as shit looked like he was dead? Why was he doing his time in a state other than that in which his (first) crimes were committed?

Fortunately, all of these questions have the exact same, simple answer — it doesn’t matter.

Grindhouse Classics : “The Hollywood Strangler Meets The Skid Row Slasher”

Posted on March 17, 2013 by Ryan C. (fourcolorapocalypse)

Sometimes, it’s almost impossible to know where to begin. Watching cult auteur Ray Dennis Steckler’s less-than-no-budget/dual-slasher mash-up The Hollywood Strangler Meets The Skid Row Slasher feels like a step back in time to the late 50s/early 60s, when ultra-cheap productions like The Creeping Terror and The Beast Of Yucca Flats were shot not only without sound, but with what sound was dubbed in later in post-production coming primarily in the form of voice-over narration, since the producers were too stingy and/or lazy to match up dialogue with actors’ moving mouths and only wanted to have to hire one person to tell their “story” anyway.

There’s just one wrinkle — Steckler (under his often-used “Wolfgang Schmidt” pseudonym) made this thing in 1979, hoping for a quick cash-in on the success of John Carpenter’s Halloween and the fly-by-night slasher genre that was then burgeoning in its wake! Honestly, by this point even Doris Wishman wasn’t cooking up her home-baked celluloid casseroles in a manner this frugal.

Still, you’ve gotta give RDS at least some credit here — his dialogue-free, ultra-minimalist approach results in a style that can only be described as uber-naturalist, simply because when you spend this little on a production (the film’s total budget is reputed to be somewhere in the range of $1,000 — yes, you read that right) it literally can’t come out any other way. Honestly, his more “well-known” 1960s efforts such as The Thrill Killers, The Adventures Of Rat Pfink And Boo Boo, The Lemon Grove Kids Meet The Monsters and, of course, The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living And Became Mixed-Up Zombies feel like big-money blockbusters in comparison with this effort, which is more akin in terms of its production “values” and “standards” to one of those old 8mm (although this was shot on 16) “educational” films they used to show you in school (if you’re old enough to have been around for them) on subjects ranging from photosynthesis to slaughterhouse operations and everything in between.

Purely as a side note, I have to say that I have no idea what teachers do when they’re feeling lazy these days — I guess give a power-point presentation or something, but I do know what Ray Dennis Steckler does when he’s feeling like mailing it in — he makes a movie like this one.

This was made at the apex of our guy Ray’s so-called “dark period” — when he got divorced from actress Carolyn Brandt (although she continued to star in his features, including this one), split LA broken-hearted, set up shop in Vegas, and generally spent his time seething with bitterness toward the Hollywood system that had rejected his admittedly unique — if not good by any standard definition of the word — brand of film-making. Returning to the streets of Hollywood Boulevard for the first time in many years for this one, there is, in fact, a palpable sense of rage that oozes from the frames of The Hollywood Strangler Meets The Skid Row Slasher, and if you do a little game in your head while you’re watching it whereby you replace the young, female victims of the strangler and the derelict, destitute victims of the slasher in your mind with the various exploitation producers and distributors that ripped Steckler off over the years, the flick becomes a lot more interesting.

Truth be told, though, that’s about the only way you can draw any sort of “entertainment” from this 71-minute snooze-fest because Ray doesn’t really do anything on his part to keep you involved in the proceedings — it falls entirely on your shoulders as a viewer to invent a reason to keep watching. The “plot” alone’s certainly not gonna do it — our psycho narrator, one “Johnathan Click” (Pierre Agostino) poses as a nudie photographer in order to lure women whose phone numbers he’s obtained via the various hooker newspapers littering the boulevard over to his pad, where he dutifully proceeds to strangle them after they’ve disencumbered themselves of most or all of their clothing, while just a few block over an unnamed used bookstore clerk played by the aforementioned ex-Mrs. Steckler gets so sick of the bums and winos coming into her shop drunk off their asses that she starts slitting their throats (sometimes, curiously enough, with a knife that’s already got blood on it before she even sticks ’em ). As they both go about their business slicing,dicing, and choking their way through tinseltown, their paths are bound to cross — especially once Click rumbles his fellow traveler’s identity — but when they do, will they become uneasy allies in their mutual quest to, as they see it, clean up the streets, or will they have to duke it out to the death, figuring the town’s not big enough for the both of them?

Don’t worry — by the time their confrontation finally does take place, you won’t give a shit about the outcome. Hell, if you’re a normal human being, you won’t even be awake anymore. Even as a morbid curiosity piece centered around the less-than-burning question of “how can Ray Dennis Steckler make a movie with absolutely no money?,” this one runs out of gas pretty fast, and once the end credits (such as they are) roll, it feels more like a relief than anything else.

Perhaps the weirdest of all weird things in relation to this production, though, is that Steckler somehow, for some reason, must have felt that it worked (or at the very leaast turned a profit), because seven years later — long after what very few people who would have cared stopped doing so — he decided to make a sequel, this time featuring only “Mr. Click,” called The Las Vegas Serial Killer. I think he spent even less on that one since he didn’t have to leave town to make it, and most of Hollywood Strangler‘s micro-micro-micro budget was, I’m guessing, probably consumed by the director’s own travel and lodging expenses, given that the on-screen product looks like it didn’t cost so much as one thin dime.

All that being said, Steckler performs something of an entirely accidental occult ritual here, by managing to warp our perceptions of the passing of time itself. At barely over an hour, this feels more like seven. You’ll swear that you can sit through the entire Godfather trilogy plus Lawrence Of Arabia in the time it takes to watch The Hollywood Strangler Meets The Skid Row Slasher. At some point along the way, this passes the point of being merely dull and obtains the power to warp the laws of the universe merely through the force of its lethargy. This is a movie that works hard to be as boring as it is, goddamnit, and as a result it manages to completely take over our minds even if it can’t sustain our attention.

Don’t ask me how that works. I have no idea. Nor does Steckler. This kind of thing just comes naturally to a master of the craft such as himself.

Fortunately, if you spring for either the purchase or rental of The Hollywood Strangler Meets The Skid Row Slasher on DVD, Media Blasters (under the auspices of their “Guilty Pleasure” sublabel) has done some things to make sure this can, indeed, sustain your interest. The widescreen transfers looks, well, as good as it can, the mono sound is bearable enough (not that it really matters that much), there are on-camera interviews with Brandt and Steckler, and we get two commentary tracks — one from Steckler which is pretty good, and one from the inimitable and legendary Joe Bob Briggs, which is, as you would expect, packed full of awesome from start to finish. A better overall package than this movie deserves, to be sure, but you’ll be grateful for it nevertheless.

All of which leads this review to one of those schizo conclusions that only seem possible with bottom-of-the-barrel exploitation cinema — the film sucks, but the DVD is great. At this point in his career, Steckler’s admitted one over-riding goal was to spend as little on his productions as possible, and here it really shows. He also prided himself on his intense hatred for actors and refused to hire any real ones, but that doesn’t matter much in this instance, since even the most talented performers in the world couldn’t save this thing. This is still, however, a film worth sitting through, if not actively or actually watching — and not just as an endurance test (even though those can be fun sometimes). I know a statement like that positively demands an explanation, so try this — pop this disc into your player and keep one eye on your watch. Hell, keep both eyes on your watch since it’ll be more interesting than the movie. I guarantee you, at some point, the hands will stop moving, and they won’t start up again until “The End” comes up on the screen. That, my friends, is some real movie magic.

The SPM Trilogy Revisited : “Slumber Party Massacre III”

Posted on February 26, 2013 by Ryan C. (fourcolorapocalypse)

What the heck, let’s wrap this up, shall we?

While the appearance of Slumber Party II may have surprised some being that it came five years after the original, it’s safe to say that when Roger Corman unleashed Slumber Party Massacre III on the direct-to-video market in 1990, nobody was shocked in the least.

Shot primarily at one beach location and one residential home for exteriors, and with all the interiors being filmed at Corman’s Venice, California studio, the third installment in the SPM series cost a grand total of $350,000 and took somewhere in the neighborhood of one week to get “in the can,” as the saying goes, so yeah — it’s cheap , quick stuff we’re talking about here.

That being said, that certainly doesn’t mean it’s bad. What starts as a pretty bog-standard tale of stereotypical SoCal bimbo Diane (Brandi Burkett) and her friends ( a crew that features a few young-at-the-time ladies, such as Hope Marie Carlton, Maria Ford, and Keely Christian, whose faces — and other parts — you may recognize from similar early-90s “slasher”/sexploitation fare) playing volleyball at the beach and then returning to Diane’s parents’ place for a weekend slumber party, where they are set upon, in turn, by their prankster-ish boyfriends, a voyeuristic “nosy neighbor” type, a mute Albino creepy dude, and finally a pyscho killer with a power drill, actually morphs somewhere along the way into a flick with a pretty wickedly sadistic, even black-hearted, sense of humor — with a pretty heavy dose of the misogyny you’ve come to expect from these things thrown in, of course.

As a brief case in point, instead of the standard bathtub-electrocution with either a hair dryer or toaster, in SPM III one of the nubile young co-eds is dispatched in the tub by means of a vibrator gone haywire! Nasty stuff, to be sure, but clearly not something that takes itself too terribly seriously while it’s dishing out its feminist-unfriendly — hell, female-unfriendly — goods.

As with the previous two entries in this series, Corman again opted for an all-female writing and directing team here in order, one would assume, to help deflect any criticism this one might bet from the usual quarters (not that very many people were paying attention by this point), with those duties falling to Catherine Cyran (one of his regular screenwriters at the time) and Sally Mattison (a semi-veteran of Hollywood’s low-budget fringes best known for her work as a producer), respectively, and while it’s fair to say that this film is the most “seems-like-it-coulda-been-directed-by-a-man-ish” of the bunch, given that it ups the ante a bit in terms of its misogyny and plays it much “straighter,” if you will, than its predecessors in terms of sticking to the standard and much-maligned slasher formula, at the end of the day it’s still a pretty tongue-in-cheek affair that’s just a bit more self-indulgent and gratuitous in terms of the T&A and overall mean-spiritedness.

To their absolute, credit, though, Mattison and Cyran, while carrying over the blatant phallo-centrism of the whole power drill thing, at least decide to throw in a bit of “whodunit?”-style mystery into the proceedings vis a vis their killer’s identity. Yes, folks, for the first time in a Slumber Party Massacre movie, the psycho might actually have some motivation for his murder spree here!

Or, ya know, he might turn out to be just some random stranger after all. I guess I won’t “spoil” anything in case you haven’t actually seen it. I will say, however, that the mystery angle isn’t a particularly involving one — but hell, at least it’s there. We’ve already firmly established that “take what you can get” is the order of business with these things, haven’t we? The same — ahem! — “philosophy” applies here.

All in all, though, you do get the sense that everyone involved here is giving it their best go on what they’ve got — which admittedly isn’t much in terms of time, talent, and money — but I’d rather watch so-called “D-listers” actually try than “A-listers” sleepwalking through yet another mega-budget production any day of the week. Slumber Party Massacre III may not be particularly ambitious stuff by any stretch, but it’s put together and performed by people who gave an honest day’s effort at the office. That’s worth a little something right there, and after the absolute clusterfuck of wanna-be “trippy-ness” in the second flick, the “return to roots” sensibility in this one is very welcome indeed.

As always, the third and final outing (to date) in the SPM “oeuvre” is available on DVD from Shout! Factory packed together with its older celluloid sisters in a two-disc set under the heading “The Slumber Party Massacre Collection,” part of the “Roger Corman’s Cult Classics” series. It’s presented full-frame with 2.0 stereo sound — and while if there’s been any remastering done with either it’s certainly minimal, the whole thing looks and sounds generally decent enough. Extras include a good little “making-of” featurette, a feature-length commentary with director Mattison, the original trailer, a few trailers for other titles in the Corman series, a poster and still gallery, and a liner notes booklet by Slumber Party Massacre fanatic/filmmaker Jason Paul Collum. A very comprehensive package well worth your time.

Look, who are we kidding? This isn’t a movie out to set the world on fire — hell, it’s not even out to set the DTV slasher world on fire. It’s there to give two distinct parties their money’s worth — Roger Corman and you, the viewer. It manages to deliver on both fronts, even if just barely. That doesn’t mean it’s necessarily worthy of a ton of respect, but it’s not worthy of any sort of scorn, either. Don’t expect too damn much, and you’ll walk away satisfied.

Not, I suppose, that anyone who might be inclined to “expect much” as far as their entertainment choices go is even watching this in the first place.

The SPM Trilogy Revisited : “Slumber Party Massacre II”

Posted on February 23, 2013 by Ryan C. (fourcolorapocalypse)

By 1987, I’m not sure that anyone was expecting Roger Corman to trot out a sequel to The Slumber Party Massacre. Sure, the movie had gained something of a cult following thanks to the VHS rental market (it did rather middling business at the box office upon its initial release), but it had been a few years and since most “slasher” sequels at the time tended to pop up within a year or two of the first flick (heck, that’s pretty much still the case), I think it’s pretty safe to say that the general feeling at the time was that SPM was a one-and-done deal.

We all should have known better, or course. When you’ve got an ultra-simple premise that can be filmed cheaply and quickly using just a couple of different locations, and the original turned a profit (however modest), then there’s no way Corman’s not gonna go back to that well at some point. And so it came to pass that, five years on from its progenitor, Slumber Party Massacre II saw the light of day.

Needless to say, times had changed in the half-decade between the two films. While not strictly a straight-to-video release since Corman was still pulling together limited theatrical runs for all his product at the time (mostly in the Southern California area), those were really just a clevver way to essentially pull “focus group” test audiences together (and have them pay for the privilege of being guinea pigs rather than vice-versa!) to make sure the end result more or less had the effect on folks that it was supposed to. Pretty much all the action for the second Slumber Party Massacre was going to be on home video, and ol’ Roger knew it — hence a smaller cast, fewer sets, and, I’m willing to bet, probably an even smaller budget (at least in terms of adjusted-for-inflation dollars). Heck, this thing even clocks in with a slightly shorter run time than its predecessor, if you can believe that, at a paltry 75 minutes!

One thing about the SPM modus operandi that Corman didn’t change, though, was hiring a young, relatively fresh-outta-film-school woman to direct the thing, his hire in those case being one Deborah Brock, who also wrote the script.

To Brock’s credit, she tried to do something a little bit different — and, dare I say, maybe even a little bit more ambitious — than the average low-budget, essentially-DTV slasher sequel allows for with this movie. To her discredit, what she tried doesn’t exactly work. To wit:

Our story here centers around a young gal named Courtney (Crystal Bernard, who would go on to star on the long-running TV sitcom Wings), who just so happens to be the younger sister of the “final girl” from the first Slumber Party Massacre flick. Courtney fronts an all-girl rock band (gotta vary it up from the high school basketball team premise at least a little bit) that’s headed to a rental condo for weekend of fun n’ semi-naked games with their boyfriends. There’s just one problem, though — she’s also been suffering from horribly vivid nightmares involving things like refrigerated whole chickens coming to life and her friend’s acne boiling, pulsating, throbbing, and eventually exploding all over the place. The one constant in all of these bad dreams, though, is an unnamed “devil rocker” (he’s referred to in the credits only as the “Driller Killer” and is played by Atanas Ilitch, who looks more than just a bit like a young Andrew Dice Clay) who terrorizes Courtney and her gal pals with a murderously-retrofitted guitar that’s equipped with a long, uber- phallic (again) power-drill for a neck.

Needless to say, once the weekend revelries get going, things don’t go quite as planned, and Courtney, her fellow girl-group rockers, and their fellas are soon experiencing a very violent reduction in their numbers at the hands of the “driller killer,” who turns out to be very real indeed.

Or is he? And that, my friends, is the crux of Slumber Party II‘s problem in a nutshell (besides the fact that the “real” killings don’t start taking place until just after the halfway point of the flick). At first, the whole “is this the real life, is this just fantasy?” (sorry, Freddie!) gimmick is kinda neat, but it definitely starts to wear on the average viewer’s nerves after awhile, and Brock’s decision not to delineate in much of any way what’s actual from what isn’t ultimately makes for kind of a confusing experience. Still, you figure that in a genre this (for the most part) cut-and-dried, things are bound to make sense by the end, right?

Well, not so fast. Brock throws us not one, not two, but three rapid-fire concluding twists that never end up leaving us with a satisfactory explanation as to whether or not the events we’ve just witnessed “really” happened or not. When we finally learn that Courtney’s locked up in a loony bin, three distinct possibilities emerge — either it was all a dream-within-a-dream in her disturbed mind, or she killed all her friends and this “driller killer” is some alternate persona she’s created in order to absolve herself of any guilt, or it all actually happened, she survived, and the ordeal drove her over the brink. And when the “driller killer” pops up again right before the credits roll, this time in the sanitarium with Courtney, Brock doesn’t in the least bit clue us in as to whether he’s there in the flesh or only in her erstwhile heroine’s admittedly traumatized psyche.

Some folks might find this lack of anything even resembling a concrete resolution interesting, maybe even a bit exciting. Hell, we all like to think for ourselves, right? Unfortunately, Courtney and her cohorts are such a largely uninteresting lot that most of us can’t really be bothered to care all that much about solving this film’s wanna-be-mind-fucking puzzle. And the “driller killer” himself is so OTT, and stripped of any pretense of motivation for his murder n’ mayhem, that he never seems “real” enough to make the purported “mystery” all that involving. The whole thing rings both flat and hollow to this wannabe-critic, at the very least.

Like the other pics in this soon-to-be-concluded little mini-round-up we’re doing here, Slumber Party Massacre II is available on a two-DVD set from Shout! Factory entitled, appropriately enough, “The Slumber Party Massacre Collection,” which is part of their larger “Roger Corman’s Cult Classics” series. It’s sporting a nicely-remastered widescreen transfer, has good 2.0 stereo sound, and there are extras aplenty including a fairly comprehensive little “making-of” featurette, a full-length commentary from writer/director Brock, a poster and still image gallery, the original theatrical trailer, some trailers for other flicks in this series, and a liner notes booklet by SPM historian Jason Paul Collum. While I may not consider this a great movie by any means, this is certainly a great DVD package.

Still, ya know what? Flaws n’ all, I’d still go so far as to say that the film itself is at least worth a look. I do admire Brock for her willingness to break the mold and think outside of the usual slasher box. Her intentions for this flick strike me as being pretty solid, and as almost-innovative as her budget would allow for — she just fails in her execution. And let’s face it — a slasher movie that can’t execute properly is saddled with a problem it can never overcome.

The SPM Trilogy Revisited : “The Slumber Party Massacre”

Posted on February 19, 2013 by Ryan C. (fourcolorapocalypse)

Ah, the folly of youth. When we’re young, we’re so determined to prove we can “make it on our own” that we’ll turn our backs on opportunities that might serve us better in the long run just because they would mean answering to “The Man” in the short term. A hot-shot young chef (a nauseating demographic which our nation is currently, and quite literally, under absolute fucking assault from) will bypass the chance to apprentice under a master of his craft in a popular and established kitchen in order to go start up his own restaurant that will be lucky to last out the year. A promising young journalist will eschew the opportunity to work as a “beat” reporter on a local paper in order to start up a “cutting edge” news website with “attitude” that folds when they can’t get any advertisers. A way-too-full-of-himself young lawyer will say “no thanks” to a “lesser” offer from a major, established firm in order to start his own personal injury practice before realizing that there are already 10,000 other guys in town doing the exact same thing. There’s no doubt about it, my friends — we don’t know jack shit when we’re young, but we know we know better than anybody else.

All of which is to say, I guess, a couple of things : one, that I’m older and wiser now and will gladly give up the “freedom” and “total control” I have over my own website in less than a goddamn heartbeat in order to go work for somebody who actually pays me to write this shit; and two, that back in 1982 a semi-recent USC film school grad named Amy Holden Jones, who was considered something of an up-and-comer behind the camera in Hollywood at the time, turned down the chance to be Steven Spielberg’s cinematographer on a little something called E.T. in order to direct a much littler something for Roger Corman called The Slumber Party Massacre.

I’m sure she’s not kicking herself too badly over that decision today.

Corman, of course, as he always seemed to, had an angle figured with this one, as well — in order to deflect, or at least try to deflect, some of the rampant feminist criticism that was just starting to be directed at the “slasher” genre back then, he’d take the largely (okay, entirely) symbolic step of hiring women to both direct (Jones) and script (Rita Mae Brown) his latest girls-take-off-their-shirts-and-get-butchered-for-being -“slutty” opus, therefore “proving” that he, himself, had no problem with the fairer sex —only his movies did.

To their credit, both Jones and Brown obviously knew full well what they were getting into here (hell, how could you not?) and decided to play the whole thing up for all it was worth by indulging in blatant self-parody at more or less every turn. Their escaped-from-the-loony-bin killer, one Russ Thorne (Michael Villella) is given essentially no motivation whatsoever and goes after his victims with the most overtly phallic power drill ever conceived of; he’s thrust into the middle of a high school all-girls’ basketball team slumber party (hence, ya know, the title) by the most contrived set of circumstances possible; and every one of the nubile young targets of his kill-spree is a paper-thin, less-than-two-dimensional cipher rather than being anything like an actual, proper character.

As far as any kind of plot synopsis goes, that’s probably all you really need here, if not more — after all, you know the drill (sorry!), right? The party’s hostess, Trish (Michelle Michaels), despite being listed first in the credits, isn’t gonna be the last girl standing (or limping, or writhing, or crawling), that honor goes to picked-on-for-being-aloof-quiet-and-too-much-better-at-basketball-than-the-others (she’s even a new girl at school, to boot! How many different ways can you say “virgin” without just blurting it out?) Valerie (Robin Stille). All the proceedings here follow the typical cut-and-dried formula more or less to a “T,” with a heavy dose of self-awareness being basically the only wrinkle added into the mix, apart from “keep your eyes open for an early turn by future ‘scream queen’ semi-star Brinke Stevens.”

None of which is to say that I didn’t enjoy The Slumber Party Massacre — the fact of the matter is, this one of those flicks that I always kinda turn to when I want to turn my brain off. It’s solid, if unspectacular, tongue-in-cheek fun, leaves a pleasant-enough grin on your face, and keeps you reasonably involved for its brief-but-just-right-all-things-considered 77-minute run time. If ol’ Russ was as smart and efficient at his job as Holden was at hers, he might still be running around sticking his power drill in high school girls today. And yeah, I realize that last sentence sounded every bit as unsubtle as this movie is, that was kinda the — errrmmm — point (damn! Just can’t help myself).

Being that this movie and its two sequels (part two being even more OTT farcical than this one, part three being something of a “back-to-basics” straight-to-video affair) have a semi-sizable cult following, Shout! Factory made the wise decision to release ’em all together in one collection on (two-disc) DVD and (single-disc) Blu-Ray. Since I’ll be going to the “effort” of reviewing ’em all here in the next few days, I’ll just take it one at a time with the technical specs and extras. The Slumber Party Massacre is presented in a 1.78:1 widescreen remastered transfer that looks pretty damn stunning, and the remastered mono sound is perfectly serviceable, as well. There’s a really good little “making-of” featurette included , a photo still and poster artwork gallery, and director Jones is on hand for a full-length commentary track. The original theatrical trailer, a smattering of trailers for other titles in the “Roger Corman’s Cult Classics” series, and a solid set of liner notes by Jason Paul Collum round out the package.

If you don’t have the time, money, or inclination to break new ground — and let’s face it, Roger Corman never had any of the above — you could do a lot worse than to tread the same ol’ familiar territory with a little bit of style, self-deprecating wit, and a quick little wink to the audience. The Slumber Party Massacre certainly delivers on each of those counts, and while I’ll never be fully on board with those who view this thing as some sort of “classic,” it’s definitely a good — if thoroughly predictable — time.

I’m older and wiser now, remember? I’m perfectly happy to take what I can get.

Tag It And Bag It : “Toe Tags”

Posted on February 16, 2013 by Ryan C. (fourcolorapocalypse)

A few weeks back, Lisa Marie blamed/credited me for the fact that she even watched, let alone reviewed, director/star/editor/cinematographer Darla Enlow’s 2003 shot-on-video, direct-to-DVD 68-minute opus Toe Tags, so I’m returning the — ahem! — favor by blaming/crediting her for the fact that I’m gonna do the same thing (well, I say “gonna do” only as it applies to reviewing this flick, since I first watched it several months ago, then gave it a second look last night). See, I kinda think it would be amusing to make Through The Shattered Lens the only site on the entire internet with two different reviews of this movie. Granted, I haven’t checked every single website in the entire universe to make sure this claim holds water, but it’s a pretty safe bet, since I doubt that more than a few hundred people have even seen this thing — and most of them were probably either friends with, or related to, somebody who had something to do with its production.

Shot for around $30,000 in Tulsa, Oklahoma — where SOV slashers got their start with Blood Cult way back in 1985 — the “action” in this film centers around a series of murders at the supposedly high-end Valley Creek apartment complex, where the dynamic police duo of Detectives Mark Weiss (Marc Page) and Kate Wagner (Enlow) are investigating a grisly series of slayings, with a twist — every corpse that comes into the morgue by way of Valley Creek ends up with its titular toe tag going missing somewhere along the way.

One thing that really stands out here : the movie was quite obviously all shot in the same apartment complex, with one notable exception —- it’s evident that the landlady’s supposed “apartment” is actually an honest-to-God house and is located elsewhere. So that leaves us with a rather incongruous bit of easily-noticeable movie less-than-magic — while the “police station” where a good chunk of this story takes place is almost without question an office in an apartment complex, the supposed headquarters of the actual apartment complex is not in the apartment complex! Hey, when ya only got 30 grand ta play around with, ya do what ya can.

Enlow doesn’t have much eye for style or perspective when it comes to the camera work, but I do give her points for at least trying to do something more other than simple point-and-shoot stuff, even if her attempts are largely failures, and she’s definitely to be lauded for managing to convince a steady stream of generally pretty attractive women to drop their tops in front of her camera for probably little to no money, but beyond that Toe Tags doesn’t really stand out in any way, shape, or form. The script, by one John Overbey (about the only thing Enlow didn’t do herself when it comes to this flick is write it), takes a pretty straightforward story and messes it up by heaping a bunch of ex-love-interest drama on both of the cops (it turns out they had both been sleeping with separate victims of the killer previously — and Kate makes it clear to Mark that she’s fair game if he feels like taking a crack at her during their off-hours) and having some seriously unconventional, if not downright illegal, police procedural shit towards the end when the captain thinks he’s got the identity of the murderer sussed out, so be prepared to suspend your disbelief beyond its usual, already-stretched-thin levels for this one. As for the “twist” finale, well — you’ll not only see it coming a mile away, but it’s waving its arms in the air, wearing a helmet with a flashing light on it, and setting off road flares.

On the splatter front (hey, admit it, that’s pretty much what you’re watching a movie like this for, apart from the tits), Enlow and her shoestring crew do a pretty nice job with the gore EFX all told, and considering the whole thing runs barely over an hour, the body count is fairly impressive. My best guess is that most of the budget for this one was consumed in an effort to make the numerous murders look reasonably realistic, and by and large it pays off, so hey — credit where it’s due.

Toe Tags is available either as a stand-alone DVD from Brain Damage Films (as pictured at the outset of this review), which probably contains a fair amount of extras (assuming you actually want to know more about how this was made), or you can see it like I did, as part of the “Crazed Killers” six-movie, two-disc set from Mill Creek’s sub-label specializing in microbudget/ homemade horrors, Pendulum Pictures. It’s presented full frame with stereo sound, both of which are unspectacular but perfectly adequate considering (which probably isn’t such a bad overall description of the film itself).

The folks who made Toe Tags obviously had a pretty good time with the whole thing, at least if the rather self-indulgent little “blooper reel” that plays during the end credits is any indication (without it the film would clock in under an hour), and I’m glad they enjoyed themselves — I just wish I had as much fun watching it as they did acting in, shooting, and directing it. I’ve certainly seen far worse fare on these Pendulum compilation discs, but often the clunkers are so bad as to be truly memorable, even if for all the wrong reasons. This one just kind of comes on your screen, tries to do its job, and calls it a day. It doesn’t make a mess of you home while it’s in it (like, say, its disc-mate Las Vegas Bloodbath), but it’s not the kind of interesting, unpredictable guest you’re likely to invite around again.

I appreciate all the effort and energy Enlow put into just getting this thing made, and she’s certainly to be commended for that alone as well as for busting her tail to make the financial pittance she had to work with go farther than it probably had any right to, but at the end of the day, the Toe Tags title is an appropriate one — this flick is dead on arrival.

Trash Film Guru Vs. The Summer Blockbusters : “The Amazing Spider-Man”

Posted on July 22, 2012 by Ryan C. (fourcolorapocalypse)

I know, I know — it’s really not even fair, is it? To review director Marc Webb’s probably-happening-to-quickly relaunch of Marvel’s Spider-Man franchise in the wake of Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises seems like setting this flick up for defeat. Truth be told, though, I actually saw this flick on opening night, and held off on reviewing it here on Through The Shattered Lens because, well — everybody else was already having a crack at it on here. I swear. I think this is the fourth or fifth review of this film to go up here. So I held off. And honestly, the fact that I wasn’t rushing home to sit down and review it right away should tell you something right there, shouldn’t it?

Not that The Amazing Spider-Man isn’t a perfectly decent little superhero flick, it is. But that’s all it is. I can’t find much fault here, really — Webb’s directive from Columbia seems to have been to, in effect, Nolan-ize the Spider-Man story with this reboot, and on the surface, he seems to have done that. The tone is darker and more somber. James Garfield’s take on Peter Parker is altogether more haunted and troubling than was Tobey Maguire’s. He’s less likable, too — a development I actually welcome. Emma Stone does a nice job as high-school love interest Gwen Stacy. Martin Sheen’s Uncle Ben in an altogether more realistic and involving take on the character than we got in Sam Raimi’s first flick. Sally Field is great as Aunt May. Dennis Leary does a fine job as Gwen’s dad, police Captain George Stacy, who has a hard-on to arrest Spider-Man. Campbell Scott, in flashback scenes as Peter Parker’s dad, cuts both a kindly and haunting figure, and the decision of the filmmakers/studio to concentrate on the mystery surrounding the elder Parkers is a good one that gives the series a little bit more depth.About the only two serious knocks against the film are the normally-reliable Rhys Ifans’ take on the villainous Curt Connors/Lizard, his performance in both roles being of a distinctly lacking/mail-in-in nature, and the CGI effects in general, which are of middling quality, particularly in terms of their realization of Connors’ Lizard persona (or maybe that should be reptile-ona). They’re not bad, but they’re not up to the level we expect in our summer blockbusters at this point, and I would say they’re pretty of a piece, quality-wise, with, say, the second Hulk flick.

Anyway, by and large, the word we’re looking for here, across the board, is competent. Not inspired, by any means, and not groundbreaking — just competent. I’ll be honest and admit I liked this flick better than Joss Whedon’s Avengers, since it at least provided some level of human melodrama to back up the action, but it seems that the lesson studios have taken from Nolan raising the bar on the entire superhero genre is not that we want more complex, challenging, higher-quality, more technically-brilliant, more multi-faceted fare, but that we just want these flicks to be “darker” and “more realistic.” They “get” what the success of the Batman films means on a surface level, but they really don’t “get it” at all.

For those of you who are old enough to remember the “evolution” of the comics medium in the mid-to-late ’80s with books like Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns and Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ Watchmen, assuming you were paying attention to comics back then, this will all seem terribly familiar — after the success of those two books, the “Big Two” publishers said they got the message and that people were ready for “superheroes to grow up.” And what did we get? Not more intelligent, thought-provoking, boundary-pushing, stories and characters that challenged the conventions of the genre itself the way those works did, but a steady stream of “darker,” more “mature,” somber, soul-less versions of the same kind of crap the industry was already cranking out — a state of “creative” affairs that continues unabated to this day. Nolan’s raised the bar on superhero storytelling on the silver screen the same way that Miller, Moore, and Gibbons did on the printed page, and Hollywood seems to have taken the same “lessons” from it that Marvel and DC did a quarter-century ago.

in other words, welcome to a new age of superhero sameness. On the one extreme we’ll have pure, unfiltered, two-dimensional, check-your-brain-at-the-door, CGI-heavy slugfests, a la The Avengers. Comics could always do these and do ’em well, and now so can the movies. On the other hand, we’ll have ostensibly more “mature,” “realistic,” “darker” stuff like this. But don’t expect another series with the innate intelligence and willingness to push the envelope in new directions that we’ve gotten with the Dark Knight films anytime too soon. Meet the new boss — same as the old boss.

Mind you, all of this was pretty much written and ready to go before I saw The Dark Knight Rises — and now that I have, my initial view still stands. Reaction to one flick shouldn’t change one’s opinions on another, after all. So yeah, this is perfectly adequate, acceptable superhero fare — but in the wake of DKR , do “adequate” and “acceptable” still cut it? Should they ever have? And are we willing to settle for movies like The Amazing Spider-Man that think that all DKR and its ilk prove are that audiences want the same old stuff, albeit with “darker,” more humorless trappings — or are we going to reward work that does what Nolan’s done with his Batman series in terms of pushing the genre itself in directions we’d never before expected? Let’s vote with our dollars, and vote wisely.

Trash Film Guru Vs. The Summer Blockbusters : “Men In Black 3”

Posted on June 29, 2012 by Ryan C. (fourcolorapocalypse)

Right out of the gate, Men In Black 3 feels dated. Not like something out of the 1960s, which is when most of this film’s story is set, but like something out of the late 90s/early 2000s. Director Barry Sonnenfeld —- who’s had a hell of a time getting other projects off the ground in Hollywood despite helming up two incredibly successful “blockbuster” franchises (MIB and The Addams Family — just in case, like apparently most studio execs, you’d forgotten) — jumps into this thing with so much gusto that you’ll forget within minutes that it’s actually been 10 years since Will Smith’s Agent J and Tommy Lee Jones’ Agent K ran around chasing men from Mars (and even further afield) across the silver screen.

Oh, sure, a lot’s happened in that decade as far as the principals here are concerned — Smith’s been pretty quiet the last few years, for one thing, and Jones has aged pretty visibly and is more or less consigned to supporting roles these days (including here, given that his younger 1960s alter ego, played with impeccable precision by Josh Brolin, actually gets far more screen time than Jones’ present-day version), but it’s pretty clear that when it comes to carrying the load in big-budget brainless summer fare, neither of them has left a step — nor has Sonnenfeld, who puts his foot down on the gas immediately and never once lets up long enough to allow us to do the one thing that’s guaranteed to pulverize the credibility of any glitzy megamiilion-dollar Hollywood FX extravaganza : think.

And ya know what? I wouldn’t have it any other way. Sure, there’s some sappy “bromance”-type crap shoehorned in here, and a love-interest subplot involving the Agent Ks of both the swingin’ Sixties and the present day, but that’s all fine and good too in the limited doses tha Sonnenfeld serves them up. By and large, though, to the shock of absolutely no one, this flick is all about big, flashy, lighthearted, comedic fun, and that’s something that’s sorely been lacking in the midst of all these dour summer movies this year, like Prometheus, for instance, that take themselves just sooooooo seriously.

Men In Black 3, quite clearly, doesn’t, and that’s perhaps its greatest virtue.The plot’s pretty basic time travel stuff — J goes back in time to prevent K from being killed, various hijinks ensue — but this is one of those films that isn’t so much concerned with doing anything new as it is just doing what everybody and their brother (or sister, or cousin) knows it’s there to do and doing it well. Give us a likable cast, some cool eye-candy effects, a couple little nifty quirks like Andy Warhol actually being a “Man In Black” himself, and you know what? You’ve got the recipe for a very familiar, but nonetheless pleasant, little serving of celluloid. It’s not at all filling on an intellectual, or frankly even artistic, level, but come one — does everything absolutely need to be? Sometimes you just want to go out to the movies, shut your brain off, and have a good time. If that’s the kind of mood you’re in, there’s nothing else out there this summer that will satisfy you quite like Men In Black 3.