SUMMER OF BLOOD: WHERE'S YOUR GOD NOW?

This is nitpicky, but I have to get it off my chest: 1992's Prom Night IV: Deliver Us from Evil is not about prom (which annoys me), but it does take place on prom night, and the main characters are making a specific choice not to be at prom, so it can rightly be considered a plot point. Also, one character idly mentions that the main location is his parents' summer home, but nobody needs to worry, because they're never around much in the summer. Which is, after all, roughly when prom tends to fall, maybe just a week or two before it officially begins.

And still, Deliver Us from Evil clearly, unambiguously shows that at the time the film is taking place, there is snow on the ground. Also, there's a snowstorm in one scene, and a line about getting snowed in at night. I mean, I know Canada is cold, but that's just fucking daft.

As reasons go for deciding to hate a movie with all the force of ones's rage, that's an awfully petty one, but maybe if Deliver Us from Evil wasn't such a mildewy little smear of a late slasher film, I wouldn't be driven to be petty towards it. As it is, the film is junk, and unlike the earlier Prom Night pictures, it's not even junk that has some compensating element of off-kilter weirdness or historical interest. It is, for one thing, the most purely, generically structured movie of the tetralogy: in the past, a crazy killer hacks apart some teens and is captured by the authorities, while in the present, he's accidentally freed and goes straight for his own stomping grounds, where he watches a few horny teens screw around before killing them one by one, until just the virginal girl is left to fend off his viciousness. All that separates Deliver Us from Evil from dozens of virtually identical movies is that the killer is quite a bit more coherently conceived than most of them; his stated motivations and his observable behavior actually line up pretty well, and he has a clearly defined personality that is consistent throughout the movie and is nothing at all like the taciturn man-mountains who traditionally hulked around looking for a chance to put a garden tool through a teenager's skull in the slasher film as it existed before 1996.

Also, his "theme", if you will, is particularly unusual: our killer is a religious zealot, and screenwriter Richard Beattie is careful to liven his script up with religious references both trivial but resonant (characters using "god" in dialogue more than usual), and non-trivial and deeply significant (as when the two female leads have a debate about what one should or should not mention in the confessional). It would be asking far too much of a horror film with a IV in the title that it should actually do anything important and complex with all this religiosity, but I admire the film for having more ambition than just running generic teens through a generic scenario, stopping to let them doff their clothes along the way.

Okay, so that's exactly what ends up happening, but the window dressing is particularly unique and challenging. That ought to count for something or other.

The film opens on the same prom night at Hamilton High School in 1957 that opened Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night II, though neither that film nor Prom Night III: The Last Kiss are otherwise mentioned in this wholly detached sequel, not even the broad idea of "the time the prom queen burned to death in the gym". Instead, we arrive to find the insatiable horndogs Lisa (Krista Bulmer) and Brad (Phil Morrison) escaping prom as quickly as possible - he came stage, she has to ditch her date - to start screwing in Brad's car. They don't get very far at all before being interrupted by menacing Gregorian chants on the soundtrack, which accompany the arrival of Father Jonas (James Carver). We've already met this deranged padre in the film's opening scene, where he feverishly prayed for guidance in ridding the world of all the sluts and whores; plainly not a fellow to forgive a bit of teenaged lust, and he uses his giant, blade-edged crucifix to kill them both with a minimum of pussyfooting around (I was all excited to talk about how Fr. Jonas "crucifucks" people up, but he doesn't use it again until virtually the end of the film, so there's really no opportunity for it). Then he blows up their car.

One can't keep one's deranged religious psychosis hidden when it's accompanied by such splashy actions, and Jonas is apprehended by church authorities and spirited away from his residence at St. Basil Seminary, to be hidden in the basement of St. George Church. And that's where we find him in the frosty summer of 1991, forgotten by all but the caretakers assigned by the higher-ups to keep him safe and sedated. We also meet here recent seminary graduate Fr. Colin (Brock Simpson, officially making it four-for-four as different characters in all the Prom Nights), who thinks that he's about to go to Khartoum for missionary work, but has been selected for a very different goal: he is to replace Fr. Jaeger (Ken McGregor), aged and ill, as the man in charge of keeping Jonas locked away from the world. He accepts this charge i n the spirit of gravity and solemnity with which it was given to him, and Jonas remains locked away for the rest of Colin's long life. The end.

No, so of course the very first thing Colin does is to dick around with the very clear rules laid out for him, and in the blink of an eye, Jonas has killed the young priest and fled to the remains of St. Basil. And thus does a movie that absolutely looks for a full half-hour like it's going to be some kind of strange-as-hell religious horror thriller that has a teenage plot crudely grafted on to facilitate a prom night connection finds its footing and turns into a paint-by-numbers slasher movie with a prom night plot crudely grafted onto its teen sex scenes. Basically, we have Mark (J.H. Wyman), who hasn't yet slept with his not-quite-ready girlfriend Meagan (Nicole de Boer), to the frustration of his pervy, voyeuristic younger brother Jonathan (Fab Filippo); their friends are Jeff (Alle Ghadban) and his very ready girlfriend Laura (Joy Tanner), who spends all her waking days leering at Meagan with a look of beatific joy the likes of which most of us will never feel, the kind of look you can only wear when you were created by a screenwriter and given the only personality trait, "adores having sex more than everything else put together". Eschewing Hamilton High's prom night, they trundle off to Mark's family summer home, an isolated manor that, a few decades ago, was a seminary. One St. Basil, to be exact.

The rest of the movie is the rest of the movie, and while the opening third of Deliver Us from Evil promises to be awful in ways that are at least unusual and unexpected, the last hour is awful in ways that are fully expected, with sex scenes choreographed to show the maximum amount of male and female butt serving as the only punctuation in a languid, aimless collection of scenes of the four teens poking around the house, waiting for the plot to arrive. It undoubtedly got lost in the snow, never expecting such freak weather in May.

In truth, by the standards of a 1992 slasher film, Deliver Us from Evil is terrifyingly functional and effective; but those are very low standards, and if we're to harbor and intellectual dignity at all, we need to set our sights a little higher. And there is no height that this film can rise to: it's crap, and not just crap, but boring crap, with only a four-person compliment of Spam in a Cabin to fill the middle section, and the two men in that equation so utterly interchangeable that by the third scene we have with these characters, we can predict every move they will ever make, so spending time with them is an imagination-starved grind. Plus, Meagan is such a powerfully obvious Final Girl - the film goes miles out of its way to establish what filthy sex-having sluts the other three are - that anything not involving her feels like outright filler.

And the generally putrid acting doesn't make these people any easier to like: only Tanner makes an impression, and I am almost positive it's a bad one, given the static, saucer-eyed, shark-toothed approach she takes to every single interaction in every single scene, as though the actress made the choice "orgasm addict", and let that be the only thing she brought to any moment. That and acidic sarcasm, though the two are harder to mix than you might suppose. Even given all this, she's the only actor I especially cared for; de Boer is thin gruel, and the boys make absolutely no impression at all.

All the film has going for it - the only thing at all - is Carver's weird, screaming performance as the crazy Jonas,and even he is let down by director Clay Borris and cinematographer Rick Wincenty, who rely on too little variation in shots (lot of close-ups, but this was direct-to-video, so it makes sense) and have a tendency to overlight everything but the very blackest scenes, which they underlight. Otherwise, it's the most routine slasher film you could possibly imagine, and while that is pretty impressive for its time frame - most '92 slashers were far too dreadful to be merely "routine" - the film's complete lack of affect makes it neither a satisfying series finale nor a watchable film in its own right. This is just useless, anonymous piffle: lazy storytelling and flat, functional filmmaking, not even interesting enough to suggest that it's for fans of the genre only. This is for nobody, and it is unworthy of the august, if inconsistent, brand name that it besmirches.

Body Count: 9? But it could be 8. The de rigueur twist ending makes it a little hard to tell for certain. Either way, I am not counting the offscreen death by natural causes of an elderly priest who we previously had seen alive.

Reviews in this series
Prom Night (Lynch, 1980)
Hello, Mary Lou: Prom Night II (Pittman, 1987)
Prom Night III: The Last Kiss (Oliver & Simpson, 1990)
Prom Night IV: Deliver Us from Evil (Borris, 1992)
Prom Night (McCormick, 2008)

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SUMMER OF BLOOD: GOODBYE HEART

Indisputably, Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night II is more batshit insane than Prom Night, though whether this inevitably means that it is "better" than Prom Night, or even more fun to watch than Prom Night, is a matter for the learnéd to discuss (for the record, though it is way more fun to watch). That being said, there's really no reason at all to compare the two: other than the title, and the presence of a famous-to-a-certain-audience character actor in the role of a school principal who is first-billed, despite being at best the sixth or seventh most important character in the film. Ultimately, this movie has even less to do with the iconic, but not actually very good 1980 slasher than that film's in-name-only 2008 remake.

We'll get to the actual matter of the movie quickly enough and I am excited to do so, for Hello Mary Lou is tremendously weird, but first let's spend some time with the irresolvable question of why this movie exists as a Prom Night sequel in the first place. There was a large enough span between the two of the films - 1980 and 1987 - that whatever heat the original generated on its initial release had long since dissipated, and the state of the North American slasher film in '87 was such that even one as relatively important as Prom Night would have cachet only amongst a very tiny audience. The most comparable gap I can think of is the twelve years separating The Texas Chainsaw Massacre from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 (the latter coming out just one year prior to Hello Mary Lou), and that's different for at least two important reasons: one is that Texas Chainsaw always enjoyed a more impressive and legendary reputation than Prom Night, the other is that TCM 2 continues the plot of the original in a legitimate (if mostly ineffective manner), making its decade-plus gap work on behalf of the narrative. As Hello Mary Lou has sweet fuck-all to do with the plot of its nominal predecessor, there's simply no easily-identifiable reason for it to bother dredging up the brand name after so many years in abeyance.

But dredge it up it does, and so we are here to gawk at the tacky - but deliciously tacky - spectacle of a movie that can be most easily summed up as "Carrie as a ghost". And, unlike many Carrie knock-offs, it's not even solely because the film involves a bloodbath at prom; there's also a vindictive, icily religious mother, and paranormal activity as a representative for teenage sexual maturation, though in the case of Hello Mary Lou, the subtext is not "this paranormal event is a metaphor for the onset of puberty and sexual thoughts" but, "this paranormal event makes the hot girl protagonist want to fuck and also parade around in a shower wearing nothing at all for a length of time that is genuinely startling".

The action opens in 1957, with Mary Lou Maloney (Lisa Schrage) going into confession the morning of prom to tell the priest that she's had sex with every boy. And she's not even a little bit sorry about it, scrawling her number in anachronistically hot pink lipstick on the confessional wall, and whatever else may be true about the movie from here on out, but in her limited role, Schrage is an outstanding bad girl with no conscience, flaunting her enthusiasm for being known as a slut and her total conviction that she really is that much smarter and better than everyone else around her in a manner that is both hammy and totally compelling. She's a fantastic, hypnotic villain, and while there's no way the film could have done much of anything to boost her screentime, it's a damned pity that she put in such a small appearance.

Mary Lou is dating the rich square Billy Nordham (Steve Atkinson), but fooling around with sexy Buddy Cooper (Robert Lewis), and she apparently doesn't care in the least if she gets caught, given how openly she parades off the dance floor to go make out with Buddy. Billy snaps a bit, and after rage-crying himself into a near-psychotic state, he steals a stink bomb planted by the school's resident delinquents, planning to use it to spoil Mary Lou's inauguration as Prom Queen. To be fair, he does spoil it, insofar as he accidentally sets his newly ex-girlfriend's dress on fire, burning her to death.

Apparently, the cops in Everytown, Alberta, USA aren't even a tiny bit good at their jobs, because Billy doesn't apparently get found out for this act of manslaughter; 30 years later, he's the principal at the very same school, having not fled to another time zone out of sheer post-traumatic stress like anybody else would have. He's now being played by Michael Ironside, the single actively recognisable member of the cast, though the nicest way I could describe Ironside's performance is "dead-eyed", not that this thankless of a part would need any more than that.

Nordham's son, Craig (Justin Louis, now working under his birth name Louis Ferreira, and the second-most-recognisable name in the cast, though I don't imagine that was the case in '87) is dating one Vicki Carpenter (Wendy Lyon), a nominee for this year's Prom Queen, and rather conspicuously all the things that Mary Lou was not: virginal, soft-spoken, nice to everybody. Denied money to buy a nice dress by her hideous Puritan of a mother (Judy Mahbey), Vicki kicks off the 1987 leg of the plot by taking the advice of her friend Jess (Beth Gondek), and hunting through the old theater department stuff to find something fun to wear. In doing so, she opens a trunk that we learned, during the opening credits, is holding the angry spirit of Mary Lou, and takes the '57 Prom Queen paraphernalia out, even further angering the ghost; from here the plot pretty much takes care of itself, as the poltergeisty Mary Lou flexes her muscles by killing Jess and making it look like a suicide - this was the moment where I went from "this movie is kind of weird" to "Holy shit, this movie is amazingly weird", incidentally - and then sets herself to the task of getting revenge on everybody even slightly involved with her death, including grown-up Buddy (Richard Monette), now a priest, and several people who just happen to end up in the wrong place. All of this, of course, requiring her to haunt Vicki and then eventually take over the girl's body, turning the sweet innocent into a raunchy pervert, something that Lyon doesn't play as well as Schrage, though she still manages to have quite a bit of fun with it.

The very best parts of Hello Mary Lou are bunched up in the middle, between Jess's death at the 27-minute mark and the start of prom, at about minute 75, with a good 20 minutes of film left to go; it is here that we get the most unapologetically tawdry shit, with the possessed Vicki Lou (as I took to calling her in my notes, and I am pleased to continue doing so) behaving like a particularly randy sailor, whether beating Craig's head against a wall for not having a hard enough erection, making out with her father, or using a crucifix as a dagger (the movie overall is weirdly obsessed with religious imagery, in no consistent or thematically meaningful way), and here that the grace notes are the strangest and I do dare say wackiest. A eulogy that suddenly turns into a harangue about the evils of violent media, *wink* (the wink heavily implied in the film), or the impressively resourceful low-tech visual effects (including the water-as-mirror trick from the Surrealist classic Blood of a Poet, no less), a death scene in which a woman is squished to death in a locker, oozing out like strawberry jam; it's deranged, fever-dream nonsense, as writer Ron Oliver and director Bruce Pittman use the marriage of paranormal shenanigans and slasher narrative structure to more giddy, junk food effect than any movie this side of the more balls-out stupid Nightmare on Elm Street pictures.

I mean, it's dumb. There is absolutely no denying that, as a revenge slasher stealing bodily from Carrie would very nearly have to be either dumb or craven, if not both (Hello Mary Lou, of course, is both). But in the middle, it's so engagingly, zestfully dumb! The problem is the ending and the beginning, in that order: the ending because it very quickly degenerates into tepid assembly-line slashing, in which this person dies then that person dies then that person dies... And the requisite Shrill, Unlikable Bitch character, Kelly (Terri Hawkes), doesn't even get the dignity of a good, high-impact death, thus robbing the rote, mechanical killing of even the worst kind of disreputable thrill. Weirdly, the film saves its most lingering, gruesome deaths for the characters it has worked the hardest to make likable; there's a few scenes of B- or even C-plot in which Vicki's friend Monica (Beverly Hendry) and nerd Josh (Brock Simpson) flirt awkwardly, and it's brazenly naturalistic and sweet and relatable in the face of all this shlock-horror daffiness; when they get such vicious deaths, it ends up feeling honestly unpleasant.

That all makes the final act feel purposeless and grinding, and that's absolutely the worst thing that can happen to a movie whose merits are entirely a function of its warped energy; in comparison, the slow crank-up of the plot, replete with its cliché-saturated prologue and trite "getting to know you" moments with all the main characters (and it's here that we have the hardest time overlooking how bad every single person in the cast is besides Schrage, and how much all of the girls look much too old for high school even by late-'80s slasher standards), is annoying and unlikable, but not film-breaking.

In fact, nothing in Hello Mary Lou is film-breaking, because it is not a broken film. Not compared to the vast majority of contemporaneous horror films, anyway. It's astonishingly uneven, combining one of the loopiest stories in any slasher film in the back half of the '80s with completely paint-by-numbers plot development and characteristation, but even its unevenness has more to do with tone than quality. The film's two registers are so-bad-it's-good and so-adequate-it's-boring, both of which are triumphantly far above-average for '87, though only the former quality leaves the film tremendously enjoyable to watch, and there's simply not enough of that manic strangeness to go around. While I have no doubt that I'd rather revisit Hello Mary Lou than Prom Night, that's not saying much, and if the film ends up being an outlier among late-'80s slashers, it is still part of the late-'80s slashers, and that's just not a very great place to be.

Body Count: Well, that depends entirely on what you count as a "body count" death, and how you parse a very tricky final scene. Tricky only in the sense that it is difficult to count; it's not ambiguous in the A Nightmare on Elm Street sense. Between 6 and 9, and I'm inclined to go with 8 or 9 specifically.

Reviews in this series
Prom Night (Lynch, 1980)
Hello, Mary Lou: Prom Night II (Pittman, 1987)
Prom Night III: The Last Kiss (Oliver & Simpson, 1990)
Prom Night IV: Deliver Us from Evil (Borris, 1992)
Prom Night (McCormick, 2008)

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