Schmollywood Babylon

The Last Horror Film (David Winters, 1982)

It wasn’t that long ago since I last wrote about The Last Horror Film, but I feel I need to write down a few words about it again now when 88 Films new blu-ray is out for everyone to make out with. With the exception of a few short sequences the transfer looks gorgeous. Sure, there’s a few scratches here and there, a little bit of dirt and a few seconds is obviously sourced from a normal VHS or a very crappy looking video master. But that’s all, and like my buddy Jason often say: It’s just more grindhouse! I’ve been a fan of The Last Horror Film as long as I can remember, holding on to my tape and later DVD and now finally in HD. Even if I consider Maniac a fantastic film, I’ve found myself returning to TLHF more times over the years, and I think it’s because the very evident guerilla style it’s shot - like a semi-serious Borat or Brüno, with a horror twist of course - but never taking itself too serious.

Not sure that last thing was the point from the beginning, because there’s enough disturbing images in there to make you stop smiling and carefully look around you to check so your mother or partner doesn’t see what kind of filthy trash you’re watching. Yeah, it’s filthy trash. Just read the beginning of my last review, and you’ll catch a glimpse of the atmosphere during the shoot: "I never seen a hooker run so fast" says Luke Walter, Joe Spinell's best friend in the interview featurette on the DVD of The Last Horror Film. The running prostitute has just seen Joe sitting on the toilet, in his robe, with hundreds of lit candles around him, showing his cock while demanding "Blow me!".

Like a scene from Maniac.

It’s a mindfuck, a mindfuck more than I thought before. Even if I hate movies that’s set in the imagination or hallucination of a person, I’m starting to think everyhing in The Last Horror Film is a fantasy in the head of Joe Spinell’s character Vinny Durand. I mean, the whole set-up is bizarre. How could a taxi driver from New York afford a fancy trip to the Cannes film festival. have several different sets of very specialized clothes, get up and close to celebrities, shoot tons of film and in the end actually cast Jenna Bates (Caroline Munro) as the lead in his movie? The last shot “in real life” is used as the last shot in the movie he and his mother watches at the end - while smoking pot - which just gives the pot-esque script another high boost.

I mean, the story even begins with a film can with the title written on it. This is the last horror film, in many different ways. Once deconstructed there’s no need to make any more of ‘em.

The coolest thing - except the nifty murder sequences - is without a doubt the footage from the festival. You can spot Karen Black there, posters for Possession and Cannibal Holocaust and lots and lots more. I wonder if anyone took the time to just write down every single film being referenced in the background? How many filmmakers which names we know but faces we don’t know is running around in the background? It was almost one year since Karen Black left us, and her uncredited appearance here made a fitting tribute to her in my case.

I love the wilderness of this film, the shameless exploitation of this pretend-o-art called film, a world where artists are celebrities on a whole different level than in other art forms. Is this film art? I don’t know, but somewhere down the line it’s satire, a glimpse of the insanity of filmmaking. Even if it’s not real and just the figment of the imagination. Hey, wait a minute. Movies aren’t real, they ARE imagination and The Last Horror Film is probably a film about imagination of making something in the field of imagination. Just with a little bit more gore and sleaze.

I’ve said it before, but somehow I think The Last Horror Film is a masterpiece. It’s an oddity, a dirty weirdo, a story flying high on grass, champagne and cocaine. Like reminder of the primitive animals we are.

Sleepaway Camp (Robert Hiltzik, 1983)

Sleepaway Camp reminds me of the times I was forced to go to summer camp myself, sometime I hated. Yes, HATE. It’s a strong word, but it’s the perfect word for child prisons like this. As some of you know I was raised in a very christian environment, and that also mean the camps I visited was slightly...no, VERY religious. The combination of pre-teen angst and Jesus-wackiness really sucks, if you didn’t know that.

Sleepaway Camp came in 1983, when slashers was on the way out - but somehow this film managed to do it all right and add a lot edginess to a genre dying faster than fast. It’s something special with a film that uses real children and mixes them with some wonderfully foul language, adult themes and a a weird sexual tension (among the older teens of course). Add a really freaky pedophile chef and nudity and you’ll get something truly unique - even if it almost scientifically impossible to make something special with a story set on a summer camp where people are getting killed one by one.

After an almost abstract, and sometimes very absurd beginning, it all begins when two siblings arrives at the summer camp. We’re soon introduced to the wacky cast of characters - both grown-ups and kids, and it don’t take long until the first one is...not killed actually...but wounded after getting ten liters of boiling water in the face. Then absolutely NO ONE is safe, and Sleepaway Camp very effectively breaks a lot of the slasher rules before the shocking twist ending - which both manages to be very offensive AND brilliant. It’s a fine line between good idea and bad idea here, but here I think they somehow did something good of it - mostly because the whole film is so camp (no pun intended!) without actually being deliberately funny.

Most of the adult cast is quite bad, with some serious overacting - and not the good one. The kids are actually handling it better, taking the story and characters more seriously. The girl playing Angela, Felissa Rose, is actually excellent - handling a part more complex than most parts for kids that age during this time. I also enjoy - with an uncomfortable feeling - the social game between the kids, from the first love to bullying - which feels way more honest than you seen in most horror films, especially in the slasher sub-genre. They’re very different, but a perfect double feature together with Sleepaway Camp would be 1982’s masterpiece Death Valley, who also taps into an original take on the slasher during a time when people completely stopped thinking and just made these films to make a very quick buck.

It’s a bit hard to discuss this film without spoiling it, so I won’t write so much more. I’m a person who cares about how people are portrayed in films, and there’s a special detail in this one that can be seen as very controversial. And it is. But remember that the rest of the film is very intelligent, very edgy in a way that shows respect to different kinds of people - and it never says those getting killed doesn’t deserve it. I find the sequels, especially part 2 and 3 far more offensive and completely lacking intelligence - and this makes the first film even more impressive.

Sleepaway Camp still holds up very, very, very well and it’s a must for us who dig eighties horror, slashers and tasteless fashion!

Deadly Blessing (Wes Craven, 1981)

I’m working myself through the less talked about films of Wes Craven, because even if I love them I’m pretty tired of hearing of A Nightmare on Elm Street and Scream. The man did other things to, wattya say about that? I wonder if Craven (and his agent) tried to find himself in that big wacky world called Hollywood during the early eighties, trying out non-horror projects like the fun Swamp Thing or mainstream stuff like Invitation to Hell and today’s film, Deadly Blessing. I’ve seen it once, around 1000 years ago - so you can guess my memories of if are vague. I bough the DVD years ago, but never watched it - until now when I got the Arrow Films blu-ray. I mean, if I’m gonna watch it I wanna watch in the best way possible.

The thing is that I have problem with stories set in religious communities. I was myself raised in one, and that seriously fucked-up my life for years after. Even today as you can see, I have problem with it. It’s just too many emotions coming up when I’m watching the totalitarian ways of controlling a bunch of confused human sheeps. In Deadly Blessing we meet the Hittites, which is a badly disguised Amish community. The leader Isaiah Schmidt (Ernest Borgnine) has lost one of his sons to the sinful world outside their farm, marrying an outside woman and using machinery and just living a nice, good life compared to the tragic, pathetic life of the Amish...eh, Hittites. Isaiah calls Martha (Maren Jensen), the woman his former son has chosen to love, for an Incubus - and soon people start to die around them, killed by an entity in black…

So Deadly Blessing is a slasher, a whodunit set in a farm community. More or less. Kinda. Yeah, it is, but still feels both a lot more serious, a little bit TV-movie and in the end just fucking nuts. I still haven’t decided if I like it or not, but it once again proves what a skilled director Craven was (and still is). The suspense scenes are top-notch and you can see how he later used some these tricks in the Scream franchise (especially from the scenes in the barn) and of course A Nightmare On Elm Street - the bathtub scene is more or less exactly the same, but instead of Freddy there’s a dangerous snake slithering around, knocking on the heroine’s submerged bearded oyster. Surprisingly there’s not enough graphic violence to entertain us. It’s not completely dry of course, there’s a few stabbings and so on, but compared to what he later did it’s quite a family friendly (well, maybe not…) slasher.

Oh, now we’re back to the slasher-word again. Is it a slasher? Well, every other movie released in 1981 was a slasher, but this maybe feels more like something more traditional. Dare I say giallo? No, I don’t , so fuck that. With the bizarre twist ending this proudly goes from being a slasher to a possession movie and here some problems arise. Isaiah is a bad guy. He’s a terrible human being, a religious wacko, a wife-beater and tyrant. But with this new ending, probably something the studio demanded, makes him kinda… not the hero, but someone you can trust and respect. Which is totally wrong and just doesn’t belong in the story. It also leaves a bad taste when the credits roll.

On the good side, Ernest Borgnine is fantastic - and completely, seriously and realistically dangerous as Isaiah. You WILL hate him. Michael Berryman is always cool and Sharon Stone shows up doing some fun over-acting (I’ve always liked her, sorry). Lois Nettleton as the slightly unstable neighbor Louisa is the female highlight of the show, playing all the cords of a crazy woman, but weirdly enough someone you would like to hang out with a little bit. Just a little bit. Nothing more. Maybe for 20-30 minutes or something. That’s it.

Deadly Blessing is a deeply flawed but also quite effective chiller. Not sure about that ending, but Craven knows how to deliver tension and stylish suspense. That alone makes it worth watching.

Eyes of a Stranger (Ken Wiederhorn, 1981)

I’ve totally forgotten Eyes of a Stranger existed, until a few weeks ago when it came to me in a flash of ungodly enlightenment. Maybe it’s because it has lived a more low-key life compared to the other slasher films from those magical years of slicing and dicing. And with gory special effects by Tom Savini! How could it happen? I think its because it belongs to those slasher films masked as normal, mainstream thrillers. There’s a few and I’m too lazy to name them, but Eyes of a Strange not only sports a stylish but unimaginative title and a story that fits on the backside of your mother’s dick, it’s also a damn fine and very atmospheric production - a child of its time, with one foot in the traditional b-movie/TV-film swamp and the other stuck in the sleazy, wannabe-slasher hell.

A serial sex killer is roaming the night and one woman after another is killed and sexually abused - probably in that order - and the police have no fucking idea what to do. Jane (Lauren Tewes), a local news reporter, suspects her neighbor, Stanley (John DiSanti, in a very Raymond Burr in Rear Window-esque performance) to be the killer and starts to gather evidence for this. One twist to it all is that Jane have a blind sister, Tracy (Jennifer Jason Leigh), who also gets into danger when Stanley moves closer into who’s stalking him!

Eyes of a Stranger is a small and cheap thriller, very much like a TV-movie. The production set out to make a traditional thriller from the beginning, but when they noticed how other slasher movies around them became gorier and more graphic, they added more gore and blood - which makes it an oddity. Not a bad one either, but hardly original. Wiederhorn could probably made it even more Hitchcockian than it already is, but wisely stays away from remaking Rear Window with a serial killer before its too late. But somehow it feels that was the intention with the film from the beginning. DiSanti is actually quite similar to Burr and he also lives opposite the protagonist who starts her own investigation. James Stewart was a photographer with a broken leg, Lauren Tewes is a reporter with a blind sister - it’s actually more or less the same.

The biggest difference from Rear Window is of course that Eyes of a Stranger delivers a lot of sleaze and violence. Tom Savini uses a lot of old tricks, you can easily recognize them from Dawn of the Dead (a poster that’s also visible in the film), Friday the 13th and hell, even Nightmares - he movie he says he wasn’t involved in. There’s a fun decapitation, some bloody stabbing and slashers, squibs and stuff that makes the heart of a genre fan to beat a little bit extra.

Ken Wiederhorn gives us a fun film with a few shocks and splashes of blood. It’s surprisingly effective considering it’s obscurity and tameness when it comes to the actual story that leads us from one murder to the next, but me - as a fan of cheap living room thrillers - loved every second of it. I mean, it’s +30 degrees celsius outside and I choose to sit inside and watch this film instead - gotta mean something!

Nightmare (Romano Scavolini, 1981)

Nightmare (In a Damaged Brain) is a movie I get back to from time to time. Today it’s almost two years since I saw it the last time, just when I got the DVD from Code Red - and it’s of course the same way I’ve seen it now. When I first saw Nightmare it was on a Swedish x-rental, surprisingly uncut and in decent quality. It was me and a couple of friends, none of them particularly interested in the horror genre - but everyone was blown away by the gritty style and the in-your-face graphic violence. It took some years for me to actually realize its a great movie - for real, not just because of the splatter, but the simple storyline and exploitative roots might confuse us to think it’s less good than it actually is.

Blair Stafford is brilliant in the lead, George Tatum, a mentally ill man who just escaped from the hospital and now is conducting a killing spree on his way to his ex-wife and his kids. As the murders gets more and more violent, his obsessiveness with his family and the trauma that might have lead him to go bonkers in the first place, becomes more and more intensive…

The story isn’t much to write about. It’s a basic plot: killer escapes, goes on a rampage and kills a lot of people. What it doesn’t lack is a intelligent storytelling by Scavolini, sometimes almost documentary style footage, a bit too intimate sometimes, mixed with very stylish and brutal special effects-driven kills. Tom Savini was the supervisor on the film - but the filmmakers credited him as the actual special effects guy - which caused him to sue and refusing to talk about the film forever since. Personally I think it’s something in-between. Maybe he felt it was a bit to exploitative for him (I mean, the man has never been simple to work with) and felt he needed to get away from the cheaper gore after a few years in the biz. And instead he did stuff like The Burning and starred in The Ripper. Says a lot. I still like him though.

Yeah, anyway. The special effects are all great. They’re very f**king graphic with a lot of artery spray hitting walls and nearby objects as George uses knives, axes and a few other things to chop his way through the cast. It’s never “fun”, like in Friday the 13th or any other similar slasher from the same time. This is much more dirtier, more painful. I can only imagine an audience of horny teengers waiting for the kills start, expecting something cheesy and silly and instead gets the death angst of George tossed in their face together with black, gooey blood.

The finale is truly one of a kind, but I don’t want to reveal anything for you who haven’t seen it. But it sure delivers on the gore front. That’s a fact.

Nightmare isn’t just an effective slasher/horror/thriller, it’s a fine low budget film with an inspired director behind the camera and a fine cast of talented nobodies. Blair Stafford is alone worth watching it, and him in combination with the massive amount of graphic violence makes this a roaring exploitation success!

Stage Fright (Jerome Sable, 2014)

There’s something special ‘bout films set in the world of theatre, musical and opera. The stage itself lends itself to a certain magic, the labyrinth corridors behind it, the secret passageways above and under. I guess most of it goes back to The Phantom of the Opera, but even later productions like Terror at the Opera, Clown at Midnight, The Flesh and Blood Show, Michele Soavi’s Stage Fright, Theater of Blood, Phantom of the Opera (the one with Robert Englund), Phantom of the Paradise, Nightmares etc etc is good example how to make entertaining horror and thrillers set in the darkness of theaters and opera houses.

I learned of Jerome Sable’s Stage Fright by mistake actually. Someone on Letterboxed wrote a write of what I thought was Michele Soavi’s Stage Fright and I kinda agreed with it. Until something felt wrong and I started to read the rest of the information and found it was a new film, starring - among others - Meat Loaf and Minnie Driver. What the hell? So I had to see it, especially because it also seemed gay-friendly and was something as odd as a mix of slasher and musical! My relationship with musicals has always been strained. There’s a few I truly LOVE; The Happiness of the Kataturis, Singing in the Rain and Rocky Horror Picture Show are a few examples, but the rest...I don’t know. They always feels a bit too contrived to entertain me. I don’t like forced emotions, which I think musicals have plenty of.

In this Stage Fright we begin like all good slashers/giallos/mysteries - ten years ago during the premiere of The Haunting of the Opera. Diva and mother Kylie Swanson is brutally (very giallo-style, with a dash of Psycho 2!) stabbed to death after the brilliant first performance by an unknown assailant. She leaves her two kids alone in the world, but they’re taken care of by the producer Roger (Meat Loaf) who since then never been able to produce anything. Instead he’s having a musical camp for kids where the two motherless kids now are slightly depressed teenagers and works in the kitchen. The daughter, Camilla (Allie MacDonald) really wants to sing and fakes herself into the auditions… and now the leading part, the one her mother played in the original performances, stand between her and one other girl. This could be a nice, but eventful, summer vacation… if it wasn’t for the goth killer, wearing a Kabuki mask (or Bukkake as the closeted gay lead singer calls it), planning to kill everyone involved in the performance!

Stage Fright really starts off brilliantly. It perfectly hits the eighties feeling without being a boring retro-pastiche like everyone else do it. The violence is graphic and the style is very cinematic. It feels like we’re watching a mix between a slasher and a giallo - and when the movie goes forward to the present, it’s like we’re in Sleepaway Camp-land once again. The opening song- and dance-number is fun, with witty references to everything from Stephen Sondheim and Andrew Lloyd Webber, capturing both the silliness that the genre has - but still keeps it real. The characters who’s established fast and effective are all wonderful, both the writing and acting. It’s that great, nostalgic, feel-good atmosphere coming back to the audience.

Then it actually goes down a notch. It’s bad, it’s just that it’s loses some of its wits. The actors (both the grown-ups and the kiddies) are still awesome and there’s some fun scenes from time to time, but the energy is almost gone during the middle. It’s focusing more on the drama between Camilla and the director… and the other girl who wants the part, cut to scenes where Meat Loaf is being worried about getting the camps economy together. It’s all very well-made, but belongs in something else. Thank heavens, the energy is back during the last third - when the big premiere is suppose to happen. There the killer strikes again, as usual in brutal ways, leading to charming and cute David (Thomas Alderson, who turns in a great comedic performance - I hope to see him in more stuff soon!), the stage manager, trying to keep the performance together while people are getting killed backstage. It’s fun and over-the-top and often very painful to watch. Stage Fright also turns a bit more serious at the end, which contradicts the easy-going first part. This is both good and bad, but I’d love them to keep it like they did it in the start.

I’ve been whining here, but Stage Fright is a damn entertaining and sometimes gory slasher-musical with an atmosphere which is hard to beat. Lots of love and passion, cute guys, nice girls, Meat Loaf with a moustache - what more do you need?

My Bloody Valentine 3D (Patrick Lussier, 2009)

My Bloody Valentine 3D was actually the first real 3D movie I saw in cinema, not counting stuff at museums (for example the awesome 3D show I saw at Erich Von Däniken’s Mystery Park in Swiss once!), and it’s still one of the most impressive 3D movies out there (together with Avatar). I’m not one of those fancy schmancy movie geeks who hates the format, I actually embrace it. What makes My Bloody Valentine more sensitive for fans out there is that it’s considered a remake of George Mihalka’s slasher masterpiece from 1981, but it’s not. Like the 2009 Friday the 13th it actually recaps the events in the first movie - slightly different here, but not much - and then returns ten years later to see what the hell is gonna happen when Harry Warden returns. It kinda builds it’s own little world around the events - sometimes following the original story, sometimes choosing its own path.

Jensen Ackles is Tom Hanniger, the majority owner of the Hanniger Mines. He was present when Warden last killed a lot of kids in the mines and never returned - including cutting the ties with his father. But now he’s back. His dad is dead and Tom wants to sell the mines, much to the anger of the villagers. But of course, it just takes a few hours after he arrives to town before also Warden shows up, on the ten year anniversary of the massacre, and continues his bloody revenge on the good town folks!

It’s hard to deny this is a fun, fun movie. It lacks the emotional power and strong characters like the first movie had, but the acting is decent and few of the characters behave perfect, which makes them more real. The red herrings is sprinkled throughout the story, some very subtle - and some not so subtle at all. Tom Atkins playing the retired sheriff is the highlight of the cast, but he’s an old veteran who knows how to do his job. I especially like how he refuses to take the charge into a house during the end and lets a young, small female cop do this - just because he’s retired. It’s an unusual thing to do, in a mainstream movie where an old sheriff should be the king of morality.

There’s a lot of creative deaths, enhanced by the fine 3D and the gore and blood is plenty tossed towards and around the screen. Some of the scenes feels a bit gimmicky - but it comes with the genre - but it’s all made with a lot of fun. I can even ignore the motel scene is all about a woman completely nude, mostly because it feels fresh to do it with a character who clearly doesn’t care if she’s naked and also fights back in the nude. My Bloody Valentine 3D also have a fun and cool character played by a small person, which is even more rare...oh, and male nudity.

I’ve seen this film a couple of times over the years and I still think it holds up pretty well. The first movie is superior in every way, but I this one is a fine modern slasher with everything you want from the genre. It’s a whodunit, like many slasher was the during the golden years, it has a lot of graphic violence and a cast that truly enjoys what they’re doing. What more do you need? Except a sequel, I wanna sequel! It can be a DTV sequel shot in Romania or Hungary, doesn’t matter - as long as I can see the legend of Harry Warden roam the screen again!

Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers (Joe Chappelle, 1995)

Even it's far from the most spectacular horror franchise out there, the Halloween series has been close to my heart since my teens. Especially after watching a cut version of Halloween 2 alone, which scared the shit out of me. It was a Swedish sell-through tape, but after that I found an uncut Swedish x-rental and sometime much later I bought the first DVD in the series. John Carpenter's Halloween actually disappointed me at the first watch, not near as gory or cool as Rick Rosenthal's! But of course it's been growing on me ever since and it's a masterpiece of suspense.

But you all know my love for remakes, sequels and everything else heretic, and I dug myself up through the series until I saw Halloween: 20 Years Later in cinema, which was an amazing experience. I still dig that movie a lot! But back to this text, which is about Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers. Not the favorite movie in every horror fans collection, but it's always there together with the rest of the bunch. Say what you want about it, but it's still better than the over-blown and ultra silly part 5, which introduced the sect-theme also visible (even more) in Curse. But where part 5 just was a humorless try, Curse wanna make up for what's been happening and creats maybe the first "aware horror" film, something Scream did the year after, Hellraiser: Hellworld and Jason Goes To Hell also later, a movie where people actually consider Michael Myers as dangerous serial killer who by now have transformed into an urban legend. It's time for halloween again in Haddonfield and the new generation of kids is mocking the legend of Myers, making signs with his face and name - bunch like they did in Scream 4. 

Curse of Michael Myers goes from a pretty routine slasher to more of a gothic feeling, where even the heroine and her boyfriend are dressed like the Bride of Frankenstein and Frankenstein's monster. That's not the only pop culture references in the film. Watch out for a Divine sticker on the fridge of Paul Rudd (yes, that Paul Rudd - utterly bizarre!) and later on the heorine is locked into... Room 237! The sidestory about the abusive father and submissive mother, the super-Rebublican family of the heroine (they're living in the old Myers house) is wasted away on a couple of kill scenes instead of something like the route they took in Amityville 2, a mix between strong family drama and gory kills. You can't have it all.

Even if it mostly gets scathing reviews from both fans and foes, The Curse of Michael Myers is slightly better than it's reputation. From time to time it actually feels like an episode of The X-Files, one of those episodes based on black magic or other versions of the occult. Michael Myers himself is less scary. A bit too causal in his apperance, walking more with a hipster swag than that of a supernatural serial killer. He’s not really interested in what he’s doing it seems. 

My favorite part, which I think they should have focused on, is the fragments of radio shows we hear in the beginning. People, conspiracy nuts, is debating if Myers is alive, that he's controlled by the government. Someone mentions that the caught Myers and too him to Langley and he there killed eight agents. THAT story would have been interesting to see, something more deep into the government intelligence, instead of just another "crazy sect wants the last blood of the Myers family to do blah blah blah...". You know the deal. 

“Michael Myers in space!”, a voice on the radio also tells us - because someone else thought the government sent him out there. This could have been a reference to what almost all the other horror franchises have done, brought their baddie into space - but this was before Pinhead, Jason, Leprechaun and the Critters took the space route to a new twist, so somehow even Michael Myers from the past laughs at the idea that he would go up in space.

...and it seems he's still correct about that, no Myers in space. Not yet. 

Absurd (Joe D'Amato, 1981)

I've always thought Absurd was a sequel-in-name only to D'Amato's earlier splatterpiece, Anthropophagus, but after watching this supposed sequel again I'm starting to feel it actually have a connection or two. Not only is this a rip-off on Halloween - and in one idea, also Halloween II, it quite cleverly could be considered a prequel to Jaume Balagueró and Paco Plaza's brilliant 2007 found footage flick [Rec]. Not that was the meaning, but there's a few details which makes them connect - more on that in a little while. 

Without explaining how a Catholic priest, played by a lovely and stiff Edmund Purdom and a crazy giant, played by the imposing George Eastman ends up nowhere near Greece, we're introduced to these two in the middle of the chase somewhere in the countryside. George gets stuck on top of a fence and rips his stomach open... Edmund seems to abandon him somewho and George ends up in a nearby house where he's quickly transferred to a hospital - where he soon heals miraculously and starts a brutal killing spree in the neighborhood - and of course ends up in the same house as in the beginning, where a baby sitter is guarding a little boy and a sick, bedridden girl! Scary!

Or maybe not scary. Because Absurd is one of the most retarded movies ever written. Not saying it's quite fun, but compared to the almost poetic and artistic superior Anthropophagus, it's obviously written by ten one-armed, blind monkeys who obviously can't write something like this because their knowledge of putting together a story and writing it down impossible because they're mentally inferior to humans. But I'm not saying it's not worth watching. It's filled with nasty deaths - often using dead pigs as "special" effects and stereotypical characters as helpless, moronic women, sex-starved men and one big eye-rolling Eastman dominating all the scenes he's in. The basic story of the priest and the killer is similar to Halloween, and the ending has some similarities to Halloween 2 - but much more drawn-out and less effective. I mean, it's very easy to escape a blind dude in a giant room. Just saying. 

Something I totally forgot was the interesting backstory to why this is happening. According to the priest the catholic church have conducted experiments on a man - who was supposedly lost at sea - in Greece, to -  think - prolong life and the body heal faster - but it didn't work that well, because he's obviously becomes a minion of Satan instead! This, as you might see, reminds a lot about the backstory in [Rec] and [Rec]2. The constant references to Greece and fast healing also connects it to Anthropophagus, which ends with the killer getting his belly ripped open - and Absurd begins with the same thing, but he heals fast as hell and can continue his murderous hobby! Have this happen before? Is the man on the island in the first movie a result of the experiments of the catholic church and is he now roaming the countryside of some generic English-speaking country? 

What the hell do I know, but it's fun to speculate. Absurd might be one fucking stupid movie, but it's still quiet an effective and very trashy slasher with the Italy's tradmarked violence and sleaze. It's better than its reputation, but far from a movie you would show to your date the evening you hopefully want to have sex for the first time. 

The risk is that you're just gonna hear the door slamming shut and someone running down the stairs crying. But that's the destiny of real movie aficionados. 

And hey, don't have a gorgeous original poster in my litte home office? :)

Psycho Cop (Wallace Potts, 1989)

Let me tell you, I’m a very humble person, believe it or not. But one thing I know I’m good at is how to use the famous Gaydar, this weird, strange feeling we gay people have to understand who else is gay. It might be hard for straights to understand, but imagine you’re living in a world where you’re in a minority and you need to guess who you can flirt with… no wonder we developed the Gaydar, which I’m very sure works in real life, not as a joke or supernatural gimmick. It just works.

The awesome Kelly, over at Twitter, asked me if I ever seen Psycho Cop – and I hadn’t, so I directly ordered the first one from Australia where it has an easy accessible DVD release. It arrived very fast and I sat down one night to watch it, with my boyfriend beside me working with his computer. He rarely watches the same movies as I do. After a while, after absorbing the atmosphere, I felt I needed to share my view on the movie so far with him: “I’m 100 % sure more or less every man involved in this movie was gay”.

And of course, I was right.

Well, I can’t prove every man involved was/is gay, but after some research I found out that director and writer Wallace Potts was a former adult film director, gay porn of course, and also the former boyfriend to dancer Rudolf Nureyev – he was also the research archivist for the Rudolf Nureyev Foundation and collected most of Nureyev’s work in two places, the New York Public Library and at the Centre Nationale de la Danse in Paris.

While the story is very simple: six (or something) young people goes on some trip and gets killed one by one by a wisecracking cop. It’s obvious that Potts, who was the man behind the movie, casted the most handsome and gayest men he could round up during the audition and somehow created a movie that could have been a movie-within-a-John-Waters-movie. There’s much camp and bitchy dialogue and fashion that only could be applied on bourgeois gay men at the end of the eighties.

AND I LOVE IT! Yes I do. This is way better than intentional campy movies, because this is the real deal. This is what a movie inside the John Waters universe should have looked like - with less sex and graphic violence. I’m afraid it’s a dry movie in every funpartment, but the cheap-looking, TV-style atmosphere with tons of bright blue and pink colors and those magical haircuts you only saw on posters at the hairdresser in the eighties, early nineties, worn by wonderfully femme male actors and confused-looking women.

For being a gay man I might sound a bit homophobic now, but Psycho Cop actually makes every prejudice regarding gay men come true – with trying to be as straight as possible. Sometime, when I’m really really bored, I will make a supercut of all the gayest things in Psycho Cop. I hope sometime this year. As a horror – or slasher – movie it works crap. It’s no tension, the one-liners from psycho cop himself are extremely weak, but the character is fun and cheesy and hard to dislike. He’s actually killing a man by putting some kind of electric baton inside the man’s mouth, which in all honest, seems like very gay. Anyway,  I can understand there was a sequel four years later, Psycho Cop Returns (directed under alias by Adam Rifkin). I hope to see it someday!