Google Analytics

One of the coolest of the on-line time-wasters is Google Analytics. It lets you see how many visitors you have, where they are from, and how they got here. Loads of fun as you try to fill in the map of the United States to get a visitor from every state (Wyoming has always been the last to turn green for me on my various blogs. They hate me in Wyoming.), or to get one from every country on Earth (I’ll never get there due to my general unpopularity in central Africa). Maybe the most amusing is to check which search key words brought people to read your ravings. I happy to report that since I did the Friday the 13th films, every day at least one visitor has arrived here after searching for “Corey Feldman bald” or some variation thereof. This amuses me. On a less amusing note, I have found if you use the phrase “pre-teen” in any context, it drives traffic up, but not the kind you would want.

Prom Night (1980)

Despite watching almost every horror film good, bad, and indifferent made, I somehow missed the 1980 slasher flick Prom Night. Since I’m about to get around to last year’s remake, I thought I’d give it a look. That way, if I can’t think of anything else to say about the new version, I can spend the entire review bitching about how the remake has ruined a beloved film of my childhood that I never actually saw.

Prom Night was the fourth of five horror movies Jamie Leigh Curtis made over a two year period*, cementing her status as the first of the modern Scream Queens.** It was a Canadian production at a time when that wasn’t as common as it is today, and was shot back-to-back with the other Curtis slasher film Terror Train.

The film opens with four children playing in an abandoned building. A fifth little girl wants to join them, so they terrorize her by pretending to be killers and chasing her. Despite her pleas to stop, they keep after her until she falls to her death through a window. Instead of trying to help her, the little rat bastards kids decide to make a pact to keep their part in it a secret. This is gonna have consequences, I bet. Although it is confusingly not told until much later in a flashback, an innocent man is accused of the crime, badly burned during his arrest and incarcerated. All this seems important, but at best, it is a red herring.

We move forward a few years, and the sister of the dead girl has grown up to be Jamie Leigh Curtis. She and her brother haven’t gotten over the death of their sister, but they are going to the prom anyway. In a dose of irony, Jamie’s boyfriend is one of the kids responsible for her sister’s death. For some reason, the people behind the movie cast two very similar looking actors, with the same hairstyle, to play Jamie’s boyfriend and her brother, which introduces a feeling of incest into the film. Then again, since Jamie and bro kiss twice in the flick and have one scene in which they playfully discuss bro leering at her body, maybe it was on purpose.

On the day of the prom, the four conspirators get phone calls from a mystery voice that tells them things like “It’s your turn” “You like to play games, don’t you?” and “save money on your car insurance”. Sumpin’s gonna happen, I betcha. There is a subplot of the ringleader of the four evil kids, Wendy, being jilted by Jamie’s now-boyfriend, and swearing revenge on our star. She teams up with high school thug Unibrow, who has been expelled from school for assaulting Curtis in the lunchroom while he was wearing a ski mask. He didn’t win Most Likely to Succeed. Wendy and Unibrow plan to have bloody revenge on Jamie and her boyfriend at the moment the two are crowned king and queen, an idea they got while watching Carrie. They probably left before the last reel.

Comes the prom, and we see true horror: a lengthy disco scene where Curtis dances on a lighted floor a la Saturday Night Fever. This goes one forever, since the producers paid through the nose for the floor and the mirror ball, and by God, they are going to get their money’s worth. The scene is either unintentionally funny or sickening, if you actually remember disco. Also, a slasher starts killing the kids involved in the original death, and occasionally their dates. Can Jamie stop this? Why should she?

The director of the film seems completely unable to stage an action sequence. He has a real problem of establishing spatial relationships and then ignoring them, most obvious in the scene with the killer and a van, where the killer seems to be teleporting all over the place. He also can’t develop any real amount of suspense. Even when the killer is stalking a victim, you don’t feel anything, you just keep checking the time counter to see how much longer you’ve got.

This is the wimpiest slasher killer in the history of the genre. Michael Myers, Jason Voorhees and the like seem powerful and unstoppable. Despite having the element of surprise and an axe, it’s all the killer can do to keep his ass from being kicked by one small-framed girl after another. Not exactly the type you build a franchise around, although there were three sequels.

A usual complaint is the supposed teenagers in a movie set in high school are really in their twenties. That’s not much of a problem, since half the kids look more in their thirties. They make up for it with uniformly bad acting.

I don’t usually bitch about technical details of the DVDs I watch, but the transfer here is terrible, public domain quality. Everything is hazy, grainy, and slightly out of focus, and whenever anyone walks in front of a window, the sunlight blows out the entire scene.

Somehow, I don’t think the remake will have a lot to live up to.

* Five of six if you count Road Games

** We try not to do too much in the way of Brushes with Celebrity here, but I feel it is only fair to warn you if you happen to meet the lovely and talented Ms. Curtis, do not mention anything about horror movies. Ms. Curtis has a reputation in general as being one of the less pleasant celebrities to meet in person anyway, and any mention that she was in Halloween or the like will make her ballistic. She’ll even deny she appeared in The Fog. You’ve been warned.

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New Hope for Public Schools

If you have children, want children, or sacrifice children to the Elder Gods, you’ll get a kick out of this article entitled “Lovecraftian School Board Member Wants Madness Added To Curriculum”. I think I’ve finally found a politician I can fully support.
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R.I.P. Robert Quarry

Veteran actor Robert Quarry has died. Quarry played the vampire Count Yorga in two low-budget but entertaining films in the 1970s, and was the antagonist for Vincent Price in Dr. Phibes Rises Again. Fangoria has a very extensive write-up of his life at http://www.fangoria.com/home/news/15-rip/1448-rip-robert-quarry.html, which will tell you anything you would want to know about Mr. Quarry. Rest in peace.
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Crimson

One of the rising stars of Leisure Book’s horror line is Canadian author Gord Rollo. His second book from them, Crimson, has just been released (It was previously published in the small press). It is a kick-ass story that begins in the classic coming-of-age format.

The book starts off with a bang. In the prologue, a farmer in a small Canadian town is just finishing a bloody rampage in grisly fashion. This section is short, but it will grab you, and I predict very few will read it and be able to put the book down.

Twelve years later, the farmhouse where the murders occurred is once again occupied. A young boy named Johnny lives there, with three friends named Tom, Peter, and David. They unknowingly awakened a creature that has been sleeping deep in the well near the house. In their struggle against the creature, one of them dies, and the creature vanishes, not before warning the boys that he is not done with them.

Nine more years pass before the creature returns. This time, he forces the surviving three to participate in a series of gruesome knife-murders, culminating with the death of another, and sending David to prison for life, framed for the murders. David believes he is at last safe from the creature, but it is not done with him…

The novel is amazing in its abilities to shift gears. The first section is a coming of age story as mentioned above, the second is a supernatural serial killer tale, and the third act is a prison story, in which David has his final showdown. Some of the setups are familiar, but the novel is never predictable, and it has a chilling epilogue that hints of things to come.

Gord Rollo is a horror writer who is worth the hype. If you haven’t already, pick up Crimson, an intriguing blend of old school and new wave horror.
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Solstice

One of the things parents have to struggle with is keeping objectionable and upsetting material away from their young children. As you might guess, my parents were way too busy. If you have a pre-teen who wants to watch a horror movie, might I suggest Solstice. Other than some drinking, there’s nearly nothing to object to in the movie (it’s the most violence-free horror movie I’ve ever seen), and there wouldn’t be anything to disturb your little darlings. Although they’ll be so bored future addiction to crack will be almost inevitable, there’s a price to everything.

Megan and her friends go to her parents’ lakehouse for a week away from school (I think it’s supposed to be high school, although they look like college upper-classmen at best. This is Megan’s first outing since her twin sister killed herself, and she is trying to get over it, hence the outing with her friends, two nondescript girls and two completely obnoxious guys. The leader of the group, Mark, is that character I’ve discussed before, The Person Too Irritating To Exist In Real Life. Usually, this character is justified by being the one who owns the house/island/jet, but here, there’s no reason for the other four to not strangle him and throw his body in the bayou. They don’t, which is the biggest mystery of the movie.

Once there, Megan begins to believe she is haunted by her dead sister Sophie. With the aid of Nick, the studly Cajun who works at the gas station (and who is about to leave for Loyola on an academic scholarship, satisfying the rule in movies that no young character can appear ordinary), the group performs a séance or something to communicate with dead Sophie. You’d think this would be the beginning of the film, but it doesn’t happen until the one hour mark. The séance goes wrong, as evidenced by bubbles in the lake. Nothing much else happens, although the not terribly interesting mystery in the movie is revealed, and it eventually ends.

The cast is good, and the movie is professionally made, but it is a snoozefest. This is a remake of the Danish movie Midsommer, which may or may not have been better.
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Seed

It’s very trendy in the horror-movie world to trash German director Uwe Boll. The hyperbole gets pretty deep, as he is routinely described as the worst director in the world, his movies as the worst ever, etc. My response to these claims is usually “If you believe that, you’ve never seen anything by Uli Lommel.” Boll is nowhere near the worst and I’ll confess to a little affection for his films. He’s never made a great movie and some real clunkers, but the majority of his work I find entertaining on some level. Also, he seems like a fairly interesting guy.

Movies like Seed make it harder to defend him.

Boll says he made it to lash out at his critics, and if they saw this movie, he certainly hit them.

Max Seed is a serial killer, already in custody when the movie starts, although his capture is shown in flashbacks. Seed is a badass guy, who has killed a boatload of people, including most of the cops sent after him. He is also something of an experimenter, and we watch long scenes of the cops watching tapes he made where he locked up a bug, a rat, a dog, a baby (!), and a young woman until they starved to death. The tape follows each of the victims from when they are locked up to the end of their post-mortem decay. The cops, and by extension us, watch all of these, although I would have just passed. Anyway, point made, Max Seed is a sick fuck.

It’s execution time, and the unknown state we are in still uses electrocution as a means of disposing of prisoners. The technician keeps telling the warden there’s something wrong with the machine. Foreboding alert! (As an aside, an electric chair is not that complex a device – part of its appeal – and the electrician who blew all your fuses when he rewired your lamp could probably fix it with ease. It’s easy to kill someone with electricity, hard not to.) The foreboding makes us harken back to a card at the beginning of the movie which informed us that it is the law that, if the state attempts to execute an inmate three times and fails, he must be turned free. (To anyone who might be reading this on death row, I hate to tell you but that’s an urban legend. They will do you till they get it right.) Anyway, they electrocute Seed three times, but due to an unexplained problem with the chair, it doesn’t quite kill him, although it is enough to fry his brain, cause his eyeballs to explode, and set his head on fire. I would think that would be sufficient power to be lethal, but no. To cover up the problem, the observers, including surviving detective Michael Pare, bury him alive. You would think that would do it.

It doesn’t. Seed digs himself out, and goes on a new murderous rampage, getting even with all those who had a hand in his near-death experience. None of this is very remarkable or coherent. It goes on like this right to the downbeat ending. I’ll try not to use hyperbole in my judgment of this, but if someone offers you the choice of watching Alone In the Dark five times or this once, pick Alone In The Dark.

I need to mention that the movie opens with a video from Peta showing real animal cruelty. Mr. Boll is himself very pro-animal rights, and it was added to prove a point, but if I knew about it in advance, I wouldn’t have watched it.