Friday the 13th part 2....Alice likes to draw...

Alice likes to draw...what more character development do you need? I like to draw too, but I think her sketches had more zazz, like Jem, she's outrageous.

Oh yeah she loves to boil water as well. When the chips are down in the original Alice is somberly boiling water to make tea. When we see her in part deux she's back to boiling water again. Jason slays her, and takes the whistling tea pot off the burner, and as the water returns to room temperature so does Alice. Poor Alice. You never get that damn tea. I hope you're sipping to your hearts content in deads-ville.

Coffin-Birth!

Reheating tacos at Mexico Joe's.....

Friday the 13th

Graduation Day

Graduation Day

Graduation Day is a misogynistic carpet bomb; a movie where nearly every male role is filled by swathing sleaze balls, shifty eyed lunatics, and coaches that dabble in pedophilia. Graduation Day is a film where nearly every woman is victimized or degraded in some way (well everyone except Linea Quigley who makes an early appearance here as a drugged out bimbo with man meat on the mind), but that’s not enough to cast a bad shadow on the low rent charm and wacked out oddball fun that Graduation Day has to offer. When a movie kicks off with a 70’s groove about how “everyone wants to be a winner” with quick cuts of people going balls out crazy over a track meet and high school athletes making out in the middle of a field you know you’re in for a real doozy.

The story centers around the death of a female track star that was driven to an early heart attack by her overly pushy coach, George Michaels. Damn you to HELL George Michaels! When other kids from the track team begin turning up missing and all dead-like, the movie turns into a giallo straight from the gutter with more red herrings than you can shake a bloody javelin at. Someone takes a dirt nap on a bed of spikes; another student gets a sword/football, wardrobe mix-ups occur (what fashionable pants mister principle), the list of potential murder suspects piles up, and right when you feel like the movie has lost some of its b-grade movie steam it treats you to “Gangster Rock”; a full seven minutes of “Gangster Rock” which is a whole six more minutes than what I had expected. Then comes the disco dancing and roller skating; boy the 70’s sure looked fun.

Herb Freed; you made me a fan of your dirty little misogynist bite of B-rated cinematic bliss. The ending is a literary apology for all the machismo drenched frames from earlier in the film and perfectly encapsulates the absurdity of Graduation Day in one fell swoop. I’m not one to piss in people’s oatmeal, so don’t look at me to spoil the surprise. *Hey look, a Vampirella poster!

*Did my diversion work?

Your blood will freeze!

The Prowler

When military personnel come back home from combat after being gone for any extended period of time they will often find that the social life they left has been taken from them forever, and that the friends and lovers they left at home have moved on to different pastures. The friends left in the military are soon to be lost as well; for they too have moved on to new chapters in their lives, are often in a different state, and whatever comradely discovered during the hardships of military life are slowly swept away. The single combat vet coming back “home” will find that their old “home” has moved on without them which could result in feelings of alienation and anger at a society they feel has abandoned them.

The Prowler is a movie that swims in that sort of rage. A man coming back home after WW2 is greeted by a letter of a former lover informing him that she had decided to move on “because it was too hard to wait”. Maybe she should have tried fighting the Japanese in Iwo Jima instead, because I heard that was a cake walk next to having to wait for someone to come home. As least she didn’t have to wait long to die in this film, because soon enough this person (Rosemary) and her lover find themselves in the cold embrace of DEATH as a masked prowler in military garb impales the both of them like stuck worms during an annual Spring dance. Kind of puts a new, ironic spin on being “together forever”, don’t it?

Cut to 1980, where the slasher who-dunnit-gambit begins anew with a college graduation dance that hasn’t occurred since the old murders happened. The movie follows a rookie cop (Deputy London) and his conservative blond partner following the killer’s trail through a night of horror as the masked man in WW2 fatigues returns to pick off any teen that crosses his path.

Most of the complaints I’ve heard about this film surround the fact that there’s a lot of time spent watching the main characters fiddle about in the dark looking for clues and trying to catch whoever the main killer is, but I think that if you sit down and watch this movie with a fresh set of eyes and without any distractions I think you will find that this film’s pace is not an issue. I really don’t think this is a movie to be watched with friends despite being a summer body count flick. There are so many little nuances and quirky characters in the film that come and go so quickly that the incessant babble of a crowd is likely to drown out some of the quieter, creepier and more suspenseful blood freezing points of the movie that I think a lot of people miss waiting for the big gore pay offs. Some aspects of the story will remain shrouded in mystery no matter how few times you blink while watching the film, but that just adds to the fun don’t it? I hate it when films explain too much; it’s like an artist explaining to you exactly what his or her abstract painting of Barney fucking a bowling ball really means. No thanks, I’d rather just speculate. I can live with not knowing exactly why Major Chatman spends all his time staring out windows at college girls, but as long as someone doesn’t come around to lobotomize me with a trench bayonet* I can surmise it’s over his loss of his daughter, Rosemary.

I believe that the killer in this film had the whole spiel planned out just in case someone decided to renew the tradition of the annual local college graduation dance. He obviously had a lot of ground to cover during the night and the town doesn’t seem to be so small that it could have been done on a whim (the rookie deputy in charge has to drive from location to location). There are also precautions he takes, like locking certain doors, that suggest that he is a bit more calculating than the normal 1980’s bull-in-a-china-house slasher.

There’s a reoccurring theme in the film about the past coming back to haunt and shape the future and more importantly, how one tragic event can shape the flow of people’s lives for years to come. The Prowler never really recovered from being left by Rosemary during the war much in the same way that Rosemary’s death left Major Chatman in mourning for the rest of his life, and as pointed out in the movie, the death of Rosemary and her partner is something that most of the town hasn’t forgotten about. The inability to move past a tragedy breeds more tragedy, and thus a vicious cycle of pain is born.

Slasher duds

I've recently ordered some new retro-slasher related shirts (Maniac Cop from Fright Rags, Sleepaway Camp from House of Mysterious Secrets, The Mutilator from Creepy Tees). I've slowly amassed a collection of grade-A rad shirts related to the barf-bag cinema slashers of yesteryear, solidifying my place in horror movie dorkdom haha. Makes me a happy camper to know that these cult smashes live on!

MOTHER!!!

My brother makes great HEAD CHEESE!

Watching Maniac Cop there lovejoy? Atkins is ON!

Can you feel the disco MADNESS?

PROM NIGHT

A fat pot head named Slick, t-shirt tuxedos, disco madness, public decapitation, electric shocks that send people shooting back ten feet, a less than surefooted killer, hair helmets, Leslie Nelson and Jamie Lee Curtis disco dancing, all dealt cold straight with a poker face; well player Prom Night, well played indeed.

Never been to a prom, school dance, discotheque, or hoe down; I had better things to do like maybe heat up some Alphabet soup to scalding hot intensity and pour it over my face. Had I have known however that prom included decapitations and classy t-shirt tuxedos I’d have been all over it like a wino on Tenafly Viper.

Prom Night; the Little House on the Prairie of slasherdom; innocent, well paced, and wholesome compared to its slasher sisterhood of the 80’s. It comes from the bygone era of valuing competent storytelling over ‘excessive’ blood and guts in the hack and slash deals of the golden age of horror. I love my excessive, heaping, overflowing trash plates of gore and violence, but there’s something magical to be had in enjoying the simpler pleasures of horror flick content with weaving a simple, believable, slow burning revenge tale involving a masked murderer stalking hapless discoing teens on their prom night. There’s also something magical about the sleazy, drunk driving, cheeseburger mooching bully in the film, Lou Farmer. I’d definitely hang ten with that guy hassling patrons of the local drive in fast food dump for some gravy.

And despite Prom Night’s silly eccentricities the movie has a satisfyingly depressive undercurrent flowing throughout; child death is a powerful tool to pave the tragedy trail and the subtle theme of premature death might tug the heart strings of less calloused viewers. Leslie Nelson weeps, I don’t immediately burst out laughing, and the fabric of the universe slowly unravels. Well played Prom Night, you made me a believer, and even if I did guess the killer’s identity in the first act I’d still invite you out in Slick’s molester van with promises of disco dancing fun.

A Black Christmas in July

I love The Burning

Friday (Fried-day) art for The Burning: