“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 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.