SUMMER OF BLOOD: HORROR IN THE LATE 1990s - FRIEND OF A FRIEND OF A FRIEND

At a certain point fairly early in Urban Legend, the character Damon Brooks turns on the radio, and a couple of bars of the 1997 Paula Cole single "I Don't Want to Wait" play, at which he becomes overly flustered and scrambles to turn it off. The younger of you among my readers, or those with the blissful fortune to have forgotten the shittiest of late-'90s pop culture, will perhaps need to have this moment unpacked. "I Don't Want to Wait" was the theme song for a TV show that premiered in January, 1998, Dawson's Creek, which was a teen soap opera that aired on The WB. Joshua Jackson played a character on that show. So it's a simple little in-joke, but it's also probably the single most typical moment I have ever encountered from an American horror movie made between 1996 (when Scream brought horror back to major prominence after years in abeyance) and 2004 (when Saw reminded horror what it mean to be intensely violent and nihilistic). It's a joke; the great sea change of post-Scream horror was that it absolutely refused to be anything but glib. It's a sequence that insistently reminds us that Jackson was a TV star on a show designed to package nonthreatening sexuality for pubescent girls; teen TV actors had become all but unavoidable in horror over the preceding year. The entire genre had, in effect, been resurrected for the solitary purpose of being made toothless as a direct result of being tailor-made for a market of teenagers who wanted... you know what, I have no fucking clue what the people who made films like Scream and I Know What You Did Last Summer hits wanted from the horror films, or even if they got. But it damn certain wasn't what I want from horror films, as I am keenly reminded every time I decide that I've been making too many good life choices in a row, and thus revisit the teen soap horror boom of the late '90s into the '00s to course-correct back into masochism.

Urban Legend has few merits or points of interest. It's among the most structurally pure slasher films of the late '90s, which is a polite way of saying that it's damnably predictable in almost all its particulars. That's a horrible fate for a film so entirely driven by a gimmick that it even titles itself that way. This is supposed to be fun, or some such; instead, it's the kind of movie that one watches with a sort of a mental checklist:

-Opening sequence with a random character who dies in a manner that clearly establishes the killer's, that is to say the movie's, M.O.

-The cast is introduced in a group setting that allows us to see their group dynamic, which in turn raises the question of why the hell these people are friends. They are each given one personality trait apiece, and it is instantly obvious which one is going to stay alive longest; she is a woman.

-There's a male who is not part of the group, but who enters into their dynamic slantwise; nobody likes him, and therefore it's a ticking clock until he makes out with the already-designated Final Girl.

-Rumor of a secret institutional history of violence is mentioned.

-A character actor, legendary among the target audience but still quite cheap to acquire, is brought in to provide some omnidirectional menace.

I could go on, but it's as boring to write as it is to watch, and I suspect as it is to read. Let me fill in some of the details: the first victim is Michelle Mancini (Natasha Gregson Wagner), who is killed when a creepy gas station attendant (Brad Dourif) can't overcome his stutter long enough to warn her that somebody with an axe is hiding in her backseat. She had some mysterious connection, unknown to anybody, to Natalie Simon (Alicia Witt), the Final Girl among a group including Brenda Bates (Rebecca Gayheart), Parker Riley (Michael Rosenbaum), Damon Brooks (Joshua Jackson), and host of a radio sex advice show Sasha Thomas (Tara Reid), who is by leaps and bounds the most interesting of the side characters, almost solely because her job puts her at the center of the only creative scenes. The interloping boy is Paul Gardener (Jared Leto), brash ambulance-chasing reporter for the school paper - I didn't mention, these are all college students. And about half of them are even close enough to college age that it's not worth calling them out on it. Some of them are in the folklore class taught by William Wexler (Robert Englund, the genre legend character actor), currently on Urban Legend Week, and those of you familiar with that literary genre already recognised from Michelle's death that the flashy part of the movie is that all of the murders are stagings of famous urban legends, except for Sasha's, which is a pure slasher movie chase scene.

The concept is sound, but it's gruesomely marred in the execution by writer Silvio Horta, a 23-year-old first timer when the film was shot, and much too in love with empty-headed "cleverness" to focus on nuts-and-bolts storytelling; Urban Legend is addicted to twists that are obvious many, many scenes in advance, and its organising gimmick is applied sloppily and with increasingly limited imagination - there's little doubt that the first two deaths are by far the most inventive and thematically focused (for that matter, the gas station is even beautifully shot by James Cressanthis, the only point at which the film does much of anything visually that I can speak of positively). Director Jamie Blanks, more a composer than a director by trade, doesn't help at all; not that there was much of a tradition for making slasher movies in 1998, but the slackness with which the violent sequences are presented, the downright charming inability to mine tension from scenes in which characters are mere seconds from being murdered, is truly remarkable. Usually even the worst filmmaker stuck with a bunch of vapid TV soap stars - and they are so vapid this time around, Leto is the only under-40 actor who has even the glimmer of an inner life - and a mandate not to freak out the 13-year-old target audience too hard, R-rating or no, can still manage to get the audience to jump a little bit from a shock cut and a burst of noise on the soundtrack. Urban Legend telegraphs every last one of its thin little scares so thoroughly that one rather sits down politely to wait for them, than springs back in alarm from them. It's wan enough to make I Know What You Did Last Summer, its exact equivalent from the year prior, seem halfway decent. Shit, it's enough to make Blanks's follow-up, 2001's dreary Valentine, look like a clear and gratifying evolution in the direction of greater talent.

A few sparks of life do show up, mostly contained in the person of Loretta Devine, who plays the school's apparently only security guard, an aficionado of the '70s action films of Pam Grier; while the young people are too generic and soulless to do much in the way of acting, and the old guard, in the form of Englund and John Neville, don't even pretend to care about the mechanical crap they're obliged to shove forward, Devine at least approaches her character as somebody with thoughts in her head that aren't exactly cotangent with the words she's speaking at that exact moment. It's not inherently great, or even good acting, but at least she seems alive, and that's more than basically anybody else can lay claim to.

There are also a few decent moments of knowing humor in among all the lazy smirks and winks, an inheritance that all post-Scream slashers needed to reckon with, and which some simply weren't prepared for, wanting to be serious but forcing themselves into irony for market purposes. Urban Legend is one of those; the more it resembles Scream, the flatter it goes, with its meta-narrative flourishes easily the most ineffective parts of a movie that's only ever ineffective. But I was headed in the direction of a compliment: a few of the sardonic bits are even kind of amusing, like the deadpan creepy janitor (Julian Richings) that the movie can't put over as a red herring no matter how hard it tries.

It even manages to toss in a few smart nods to its urban legend gimmick, though never when it looks at them directly; the callers to Sasha's show have problems that map to urban legends, the last scene quietly evokes the story of the woman with a ribbon around her neck. These are nice, lovely grace notes, and the film desperately needs them; for without them it is sheer junk, a derivative slasher that is worth paying attention to only in that its absolute lack of creativity gives it some value as a survey of all the most generic elements of the '90s horror resurgence in its second year, right down to the irrevocable time-stamp of the prominent use of "Zoot Suit Riot" on the soundtrack

Body Count: That depends on how exactly you want to interpret the last scene: in keeping with the urban legend motif, the film allows the possibility that what "happened" is different based on the teller. But it's probably never going to be lower than 9. Also a dog that ended up in a microwave, also in keeping with the motif.

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SUMMER OF BLOOD: THE SLASHER FILM - A REAL NAIL-BITER

So you'd have to be such an idiot that there's not a word for it in English to expect a film titled Nail Gun Massacre to be even a little bit classy. Still, the speed with which it reveals the incorrigible depths to which its not-classiness reveals itself caught me by surprise - it's not just any movie that opens with a gang rape, and by "opens with a gang rape", I don't mean that's what happens in the first scene. I mean that's what happens in the literal first second of the film's running time.

And with that jolly kick-off, I welcome you to the absolute dregs of human artistry: direct-to-video horror movies in the 1980s. The great slasher boom had largely exhausted itself by the end of 1984, just in time for the newly expanding home video market to create a new, if even cheaper and more threadbare opening for for savvy producers with a halfway decent make-up artist and a couple young actresses willing to take their tops off. It was a grubbier world with fewer rules and smaller budgets, attracting and thriving on a lower tier of talent than was necessary to pass theatrical muster. This resulted in some of the tackiest, tawdriest movies in the history of the medium as well as some of the most impossibly ill-made. Even within that company, though, Nail Gun Massacre is something special. There is not a more inappropriate word than "special". I'm sorry. That's just horrible writing.

But faced with the garishness of a movie depicting a rape in its opening frame, and only gets worse and more exploitative from there, language itself starts to break down a bit. You know that feeling when you're watching a movie for the first time, and you can already tells that it's one for the ages? Nail Gun Massacre is the opposite of that. In my notes I had written down "this is the fucking worst" before the 10-minute mark, and "this is THE FUCKING WORST MOVIE IN HISTORY" around an hour in. That's probably hyperbole. It is, however, the worst movie of the 1980s. I'm very comfortable and confident in making that claim, and I don't give a shit if I haven't seen every movie of the 1980s yet.

An attempt to describe in prose the experience of watching the film would be titanically boring, since there is virtually no plot, and the little bit that scrapes its way through, the film tries very, very hard to keep hidden. So it begins, a propos of nothing, with a gang rape, yes? And then people start dying? Unless this was to be some manner of confrontational, experimental anti-narrative, in which unrelated events take place in an arbitrary order, we can be forgiven for assuming that the murders are an act of vengeance for the rape. That's basic, 1+1=2 logic. Even the briefest, monosyllabic summary of Terry Lofton's heavily reduced script implies that motivation for this particular massacre. The movie pretends that we haven't figured that out for almost 70 minutes. This movie is a grand total of 85 minutes long. That's a repellent amount of stalling for a story that literally could not function without its "secret" being obvious from the opening, and the scene in which Doc (Rocky Patterson), the thirtysomething doctor in a small Texas town who is the closest the movie has to a hero, explains his realisation is static, maddeningly dull, and criminally mis-performed by Patterson, who like every member of the cast seems to be reciting lines that he can't begin to parse and never memorised. Elsewhere in the film, two men who were part of the original crime say their goodbyes to the visibly hostile owner of a lumberyard (Beau Leland), who mutters under his breath "I'll see you sooner than you think" with a snarl on his face. GEE I WONDER WHO THE KILLER MIGHT BE. And the film acts as though we didn't notice that, either.

There is one possibility I can imagine that might justify all this as anything but rank incompetence: co-directors Lofton and Bill Leslie were aware that the audience only cared about the killing scenes, and gave the plot away to let the audience stay ahead of the story and enjoy the ride, like Hitchcock and Vertigo. It's certainly the cast that Lofton and Leslie were only interested in staging murders; God knows there's little enough else that happens in the movie. I've already punted on trying to explain the story, but if I were going to, it would be something like this: men, usually two, who presumably had something to do with the rape - the movie doesn't try very hard to make sure we recognise characters from the opening scene, up to and including the victim, and the killer attacks plenty of people who had absolutely nothing to do with, including no fewer than five women, which I think spoils his feminist bona fides - are in an isolated location. They are approached, in a comically abrupt fashion, by a wiry little man in camouflage and a jet black motorcycle helmet with the eyepiece covered in gaffer tape, and with a ludicrous synthed-up voice that sounds like a cross between Darth Vader, Jeff Foxworthy, and Ben Stein. He quickly kills one of them with the nail gun he has handy, and then spouts several sentences. Some of them quips; fewer of them puns than you'd think. "You should never hitch a ride with a hearse, unless you're dying", he snaps to a hitchhiker to tried to thumb a ride, which is A) not funny and B) not wordplay. Oh, and the bit about the hearse is because the killer drives a hearse that has been painted bright gold. It says so much about Nail Gun Massacre that I almost forgot to mention a detail like that. He then kills the other person, if there were two, and quips some more.

As a palate cleanser in between these evocative scenes of people slumping to the ground with the heads of nails glued unpersuasive to their faces with red food dye being dribbled on their skin, we encounter Doc and the Sheriff (Ron Queen) executing the most aimless murder investigation in the annals of crime, which consists mostly of swapping the observations "[chaws thoughtfully] We nev'r used ta have this many killin's". "[nods, or just stares glassily for about ten seconds] Lot of 'um happening on Old Lady Bailey's property. Wonder if we should go to th' house". "Aww, you don't think Old Lady Bailey has anything to do-" "Course not".

Along the way, we're introduced to a panoply of non-actors of the most awe-inspiring sort. I'm particularly fond of the helpless soul who delivers the line, "Well Tom, in your infinite wisdom, I'm sure you will figure it out in due time" without seeming to know the meaning of any word in that sentence other than "Well" and "I'm". But the clear standouts are Frances Heard (Terry Lofton's grandma!) as a shopkeeper who keeps adjusting her glasses and fearlessly marches on through her pointless expository lines even after she fluffs some of them, and an old man whose identity I cannot certainly attest to (the credits are full of vague descriptions with #1 and #2 following almost all of them) who loudly mumbles with the most impenetrable Southern accent I've encountered in movies in a long while.

Not helping the actors at all, the scenes that don't involve people dying have a nasty tendency to stretch to several minutes a moment that could have been dealt with in half of a line, and frequently could have been snipped out of the film entirely. Such as the great "getting directions" scene, with the dialogue being largely drowned out by background traffic noise. But slamming the film for its technical limitations would be like kicking a beagle puppy. And insulting the directors for their lifeless camera would be pointless, almost as pointless as losing interest in the action altogether to blandly zoom into a naked pair of breasts.

Oh! That's another thing, the porn! Twice, the movie stops being an addled collection of shoddy death scenes and a glacial depiction of the minutiae of human conversation to watch people having simulated sex. And in real time. In fairness, assuming that the cast was hired because of their experience in regionally-produced rural Texas pornography answers most of my objections to the acting, but I don't think that's fair to assume. Anyway, the end of the first sex scene is my favorite part of the whole movie: the dude is lying there dead, and the woman falls on top of him, and the image simply refuses to move or cut for tens of seconds, all while the framing pretty much insists that we notice that their pubic hair is extremely visible in both cases.

This is the most bitterly functional kind of slasher movie that could possibly be: a weak pretext that's only followed about half of the time for a lengthy chain of killings with almost nothing else that could possibly constitute a narrative. It is vile, and it is sleazy, and it is insufferably slow moving nearly all of the time. There is one and only one saving grace to any of this: it is also indescribably ill-made. The acting, the writing, the staging - it's amateurs and first-timers, mixed with an awful degree of cynicism about the market sector the film is targeting. It is, frequently, truly impossible to believe that the thing onscreen could possibly have been made, and it's so daft that it manages to be weirdly compelling even though the whole thing is rotten, from the core to the surface. I have never seen such a reprehensible slasher movie in all my days, but that's not to say that it's not transfixing.

Body Count: 16, and impressively, only one of those does not involve a nail gun. Truth in advertising!

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SUMMER OF BLOOD: THE SLASHER FILM - SISTERS IN BLOOD

Look at that poster and despair! Every aspect of it - the purple, the lighting, the woman's pose, the woman's deeply inefficient clothing, and every last piece of text - promises a sultry erotic drama. The only thing, and even then it's questionable, that tips us off that it's anything even near to the vicinity of horror is the actual font used for the words The House on Sorority Row themselves. And I'm not the only one who thought so: writer-director Mark Rosman, for whom this was a labor of love uncommon in slashers of the 1980s was a vocal opponent of the image that, whatever the hell it was selling, didn't have a damn thing to do with the actual content of the film. Which for the most part is exactly what you suppose that a slasher film released in 1983 under the title The House on Sorority Row would have as its content. The sub-sub-genre of slasher films set in college housing was older than the slasher boom of the 1980s; no less a seminal text than the 1974 Black Christmas tells a story that's much akin to the one in THoSR, different more in cosmetic details (the time of year; the exact nature of the scenes that take place while the killing is waiting to start up) than in anything of substance.

Despite how obviously it would seem to be case that what you see is exactly what you get, THoSR has picked up a reputation over the years as one of the slasher movies that get it right. It is one of the handful of '80s slashers deemed iconic enough to win its very own remake, for one thing, in the form of 2009's Sorority Row, and it was one of the last breakout hits as the slasher genre started to run out of gas in '83 and '84 - just a mere $10.6 million, but on a penny-pinching budget of less than a half-million dollars, that was a pretty miraculous return on investment at the time.

The trick about the film is that it absolutely deserves its reputation, but it doesn't seem that way for a really long time. At the beginning, in fact, The House on Sorority Row seems to be at best a lateral step in quality from the previous year's crummy The Dorm That Dripped Blood, to keep it within the college slasher wheelhouse. It pukes characters at us without slowing down to differentiate them, or in some cases even give them names, and all the characteristics it bothers to deliver are enough to promise that we're going to really hate spending 90 minutes in their dwindling company. And even that's only after the film's greatly unpromising opening scene: on 19 June, 1961, a woman give birth via caesarian section to a baby who is grimly declared by the doctor to be yet another failure. A failure at what, we're not told. And if you share my particular set of hang-ups, you don't care, either: the sequence, intended by Rosman to be in black-and-white, was tinted blue at the distributor's insistence, which had the effective of accentuating some already cloudy focus, and it all basically looks like you washed your contacts in Vaseline before watching the movie. You know what's crisp, though? The sound. The sound is so crisp and hard and over-recorded that it just about cuts your eardrums. And of course, this is all so emphatically vague that you just know goddamn well that it's going to rotate back and provide the hideous backstory of the movie later on.

So that wraps itself up, anyway, and the movie picks up - still in a groove that feels like it comes from a battered library copy of the How to Make a Slasher playbook, but at least it starts to have momentum - to find the last day of school. Would you believe that it's 19 June? You had damned well better. Seven women, all seniors, all members of the same sorority, have stayed behind to plan a party at their sorority house, and in so doing are knowingly breaking the rules, to their peril: house mother Mrs. Slater (Lois Kelso Hunt, redubbed by Barbara Harris - and through no fault of either actress, the re-dubbing is the most atrocious, film-breaking thing) is a mean tyrant at the best of times, and she openly hates the girls in her care, which makes defying her a fools' errand. And this is not the best of times: Slater's physician, Dr. Beck (Christopher Lawrence), has just given her the news that her unspecified Condition is getting worse, and she should avoid stress, particular the unspecified Stress that exists back at the sorority house.

Coming back to find her unwanted wards fucking around, getting drunk, and having playfully smutty conversations is exactly the worst thing for Slater's mood, and so it is that she goes a little bit nuclear. This leads the girls, and especially queen bee Vicki (Eileen Davidson), to concoct a nasty plot: they'll throw Slater's omnipresent cane, with a nastily spiky decorative top, into the filthy pool she refuses to clean, and force her to dive in to retrieve at gunpoint. Fake gunpoint of course. But we wouldn't have a movie if the gun didn't accidentally have a real bullet after the blanks, and if Vicki didn't accidentally murder Slater. In a panic, and with a whole mess of people to show show up any minute for a going-away party, the girls, absent the requisite sexless moral one, Katherine (Kathryn McNeil), agree to pitch the old woman's body in the murky water and deal with her later. I pray that I give away nothing if I mention that during the party, the girls (and, for no obvious reason, one random guy) start vanishing, killed by a shadow wielding that same spiky cane, and by the time the survivors have figured out what's going enough to shutter the party and investigate the pool, Slater's body is missing.

It's enough of a frustration that this supposedly Actually Good Slasher Movie has such a somberly trite plot; the part that really annoyed me was that it couldn't even bother to distinguish the five sisters who weren't the obvious Final Girl Katherine, or the obvious Guilty One Who Dies Last Vicki. They are, for the record, Liz (Janis Zido), Jeanie (Robin Meloy), Diane (Harley Kozak), Morgan (Jodie Draigie), and Steve (Ellen Dorsher), and other than their hairstyles, I could not tell them apart with a gun to my head. But Rosman games things a little bit: when he separates a girl from the group, to have her meet her grisly end, that's when he throws in odd and unexpected grace notes of characterisation. In tiny little gestures, sometimes as simple as focusing on the actresses' expressions longer than seems natural, the film quickly etches out a little bit of something we should know about each of these women right at the moment we know that they're going to die. And then, in most cases, the film cuts to Katherine wondering aloud where [name] might have gotten to. It's ironic, of course, but the way it's repeated, almost like a litany, also serves a symbolic reminder that each of the victims has an identity, and they have at least one person who's actively concerned for them. This is small, but it adds a layer of confusing, "that's not what slashers do" depth to the proceedings.

Meanwhile, THoSR also plays around with our expectations by its stylistic weirdness. That Rosman had an attachment to the material rare in a slasher director, I have noted (it somehow feels exactly right that his career wouldn't end up in derivative horror, but in shepherding Hilary Duff properties to completion), and this resulted in some anxiety about doing unusual things with the camera - not always successfully! There's a slow zoom into Slater's unreadable face when she's staring down Vicki and the gun that is an absolutely wretched choice. But in generalities more than in specifics, THoSR benefits from a more subdued, watchful style than the usual flat-footed "hey, ya wanna see tits? Howsabout some gore?" camera-wrangling. And even that's not as noticeable as the incongruous Richard H. Band score, which is easily the most off-kilter music I've ever heard in a slasher movie. In and of itself, it's full of soaring, Romantic poetics, like an ad for diarrhea medicine that spends its whole running time focusing on gauzy shots of wildflowers, accomplished with generic hackiness. So it's pretty, but in an empty way - which is no different than pretty with structural pyrotechnics and complex harmonies, when the context for it is a run-of-the-mill slasher movie.

The textural strangeness that happens from the visuals and the music is enough to make THoSR an unusual, unexplainable experience for long enough that it's hard to get bored with it during its largely adequate first and second acts, typified by thoroughly unexceptional performances, too-long cutaways to a band playing at the girls' party, and murders that are significantly lacking in blood. And that is its most important trick - to get us to the third act without having turned on it. Because the third act - it's amazing. There's very little in 1980s American horror that compares to it. What happens, in the essentials, is that Dr. Beck shows up, knowing exactly what's going on, and he decides to set a trap for the killer, with Katherine as bait. To this end, he gives her a sedative against her will (and for this sin, he appropriately dies), and it apparently has a hallucinogenic quality as well, for what happens to Katherine's mind over the next ten minutes abandons any conventional mode of horror for a surrealist collage of image, lighting, and editing - tiny little jump cuts that feel like the movie is having a series of strokes, the disorienting impression that a little toy clown has instantaneously leaped to human size to embody the killer, and the film's most famous image, of a disembodied head looking up from a toilet bowl with a patient, knowing look. Some of these images are genuinely hallucinatory, some are real things Katherine sees, given a fuzzy abstraction thanks to the overall bugfuck mood of this whole ending gambit. But all of them are striking.

The end of The House on Sorority Row is among the most captivating, essential stretches of cinema in the whole of the 1980s slasher boom, fully justifying every minute of the sometimes aimless experience of the movie up to that point. A great final act following a slightly intriguing but mostly banal hour and change is hardly enough to make an all-time great genre film, and I'd rather have any of the top-to-bottom great slashers than one that peaks after making me wake for too damn long. But this is still essential viewing for anyone with even a little bit of interest in the overall slasher ecosystem, easily the best slasher of 1983 (not a high bar), and a demonstration that intentional, creative filmmaking can happen in any atmosphere, even when the limits of genre put firm bounds on how much that filmmaking is allowed to flourish.

Body Count: 9 humans and one pet songbird.

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SUMMER OF BLOOD: THE SLASHER FILM - THE EX-BOYFRIEND FROM HELL

As this final Summer of Blood arrives at the slasher boom of the 1980s, it feels like a homecoming. For this is where we belong, truly: in the gutter trash world of miserably formulaic thrillers, propped up only by their most exploitative element and frequently by nothing at all. And while it's surprisingly willing to break with formula, director Joseph Zito's The Prowler, an independent release from the slasher's artistic peak year of 1981, certainly fits the second half of that summary. For the gore effects, by the justifiably legendary make-up designer Tom Savini, are as good as it gets, so persuasive and bold that they were cut to almost nothing by the reliably nervous censors in the United Kingdom, while winning Savini's praise as the work of which he is proudest from his estimable career. And there's damn little else about the movie that's of any particular merit at all. What the movie does best, perhaps, is to point out that just because a slasher film finds way to up-end and re-imagine all the usual formula signposts, it's not inherently the case that it will be good as a result of doing all of that.

And sure enough, The Prowler isn't much damn good at all, though it keeps promising that it will be, for serious, any minute now, just keep being patient. But it definitely starts out on the most unconventional footing it can manage. I beg you to tell me, how many slasher movies can you name that would have the guts to make this their very first image?

The next ten minutes are beyond doubt the weirdest and most interesting The Prowler has to offer; they're frankly among the weirdest and most interesting in the whole slasher movie Class of '81. And they are also typical of all the things that can frequently make the movie a frustrating, limited experience, since we find the movie trying three different times to start itself: first with this newsreel proclaiming the return of Our Boys from Europe following VE Day. Then it goes backwards, I think, to a letter by Rosemary Chatham, sorrowfully confessing to her boyfriend overseas (left without a name) that she just can't keep waiting, and she needs to let him go. Then it goes forward to 28 June, 1945, where the town of Avalon Bay is celebrating its graduation day dance, and we get to meet Rosemary in the flesh (Joy Glaccum), along with her new fella Roy (Timothy Wahrer), in a sequence that takes its nice, sweet time establishing the place of 1945 with remarkable attention to sound, costume, and behavior. It's not any kind of robust historical docudrama, or anything silly like that. But for a movie designed for no purpose other than removing teenagers from their dollars on the promise of violence and the odd pair of naked breasts, The Prowler's evocation of the '40s is surprisingly earnest.

Let us please not pretend that it's any more than what it is: the same exact first scene from dozens of other slashers, some of which had already been made by the time this film came out. It's the scene set in the past that shows how the killer started his career and sets up the scenario for the present-day sequences (no, tragically, The Prowler is not set in its entirety in the summer of '45; if it were, it's a dead certainty that it would be my favorite slasher movie of all time). And sure enough, just when Rosemary and Roy have sneaked away to spend some time alone, they're set upon by a man wearing the uniform of a U.S. infantryman, who pins them both together with a pitchfork. The attentive will note that this had already happened earlier in 1981, albeit with a different weapon, in Friday the 13th, Part 2, and in both cases the filmmakers were undoubtedly stealing primarily from Mario Bava's Bay of Blood/Twitch of the Death Nerve. Of course, that's because it's a great image that gets to the hard of the entire project of the slasher film: garish violence as a surrogate and punishment for sex. But it's also telling that in only its second year of widespread mainstream existence, the slasher film was already obliged to recycling ideas in such a conspicuous way.

The death of Rosemary and Roy throws us to the opening credits and thence into the future by exactly 35 years: now it's 28 June, 1980, the day of the graduation dance in Avalon Bay (this is a college graduation, not the more typical slasher setting of high school). Moreover, the day of the first graduation dance in Avalon Bay since that fatal one; Rosemary's father, Major Chatham (Lawrence Tierney, barely present), the town's foremost citizen, has spent every one of the last years using his influence to prevent the resurrection of this most hated reminder of his personal tragedy. But he has descended into weakness and senescence, and local student Pam MacDonald (Vicky Dawson) has spearheaded a movement to bring back the old tradition. And the attentive will notice that this also already happened earlier in 1981, in the form of My Bloody Valentine. For which we must surely only blame parallel evolution, though it's a weirdly specific case of that.

And at this point, The Prowler certainly becomes a much more typical slasher movie than the opening promised, though it still has some tricks up its sleeve. Pam has two roommates, Sherry (Lisa Dunsheath) and Lisa (Cindy Weintraub), who pretty neatly slot into "the slutty one" and "the pothead who's also, as it happens, the slutty one" stereotypes, while Pam is pretty significantly neither of those things. Pam does have a boyfriend, though, Deputy Mark London (Christopher Goutman), who has been put in charge briefly while Sheriff Fraser (Farley Granger) is on a fishing trip. And this will prove to be a very useful contact. See, Pam and Lisa are ready to head to the dance while Sherry's still getting ready and waiting for her boyfriend Carl (David Sederholm). He shows up, interrupting her in what I can only think of as a parody of the Psycho shower scene, and then a moment or two later is stabbed in the head with a bayonet, in one of the great triumphs of Savini's or anybody else's career. It's such a phenomenal piece of prop-making that Zito lingers on it well past any point of taste or even sense: as we watch Carl writhing and struggling for almost a minute against an attack that should have killed him almost instantly, it goes from scary to unnecessarily gross to silly. But it's never less than mind-blowing technique.

The same thing holds true for Sherry's death a moment later: she's attacked with a pitchfork in the shower, and it's filmed from every showcase angle that Zito and cinematographer João Fernandes can scrounge up. This time it never quite manages to round the corner to "silly", since this whole time the victim is wet and topless - in fact, The Prowler is unique to my slasher film knowledge in that its one and only boob scene is completely contained within one of its gore scenes. And that somehow feels crueler and more exploitative than if there had been some utterly extraneous nude scene just for the hell of it.

But morality and taste and sense all aside, the twin killings here are the best The Prowler will ever have to offer again. Back at the dance, Mark dances with another girl and earns Pam's ire; while trying to apologise, he manages to spill punch on her dress, earning even more. When she storms back to the dorms to change, she crosses paths with the man in the infantry uniform, and escapes from his clutches, after a discomfiting run-in with Major Chatham. And that's how, just about one-third of the way through its 89-minute running time, The Prowler has already entered, in a very vague way, its Final Girl sequence (as it were; this film leaves many more people alive than the phrase "Final Girl" implies), as the rest of the movie becomes an investigation by Pam and Mark into who the prowler and what he's up to (Sherry and Carl's bodies go undiscovered until the titanic pile of bullshit that is the movie's last scene), while just enough people trickle out of the dance to end up in the path of his bayonet and pitchfork.

The strengths and considerable weaknesses of the film are basically identical: Zito likes to keep things moving slow. When that results in giving Savini's gore effects a nice long showcase, or spending plenty of time building the '40s atmosphere that makes the opening sequence such a quirky experience, it's great, and makes The Prowler one of the most distinguished slashers of its era. But far more often, the result is a scene, stretching out for minutes and minutes, of nothing whatsoever happening while Pam and Mark stand around in the dark looking at clues and never putting together what's obvious to us from literally before the movie has even started: Rosemary's ex-boyfriend killed her and Roy in '45, and now that the dance is happening again, he's gone crazy and is killing again because of psycho killer reasons. Unless the contemporary killer is Major Chatham, raging against the bastard kids who've ripped open the memory of Rosemary's death. Either way, that leaves us with just two candidates for the title of the killer, and the one who isn't guilty vanishes out of the movie with no explanation.

But that's just an annoyance, sloppy writing of the kind that happens all the time in low-rent horror. It's the lingering that really makes The Prowler such a dispiriting experience; the waiting around in dark rooms for anything to happen, while quietly, sadly being certain that it will not. In the hands of great filmmakers, this would be potentially great material for turning the heat on real low and letting the film boil us alive; the tension crawling up our spines and making the movie almost unbearable by the end of it, in the best possible way. "Unbearable" would be overstating things - Dawson is an appealingly grounded protagonist for a slasher movie, and she helps to make the thing at least slightly interesting on a human level in between the moments that it's excitingly gory.

It is, though, atrociously dull, and that gets us into the neighborhood of unbearable, anyway. The film's unmistakble low points are very low - a random basement sex scene involving characters who are never thereafter heard from again, the worst imagined shock scene at the end that I think I've ever seen in a slasher movie, and so much aimless padding. So much. A film with The Prowler's specific strengths ought to be at least worth it for the genre faithful, and it is - but it is solely for the faithful, and only after they've seen enough of them that The Prowler's deviations from the norm can be seen and appreciated for what little pleasure they offer.

Body Count: 8, plus the horrible news in the opening scene that Glenn Miller's plane went down in bad weather.

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BULLY PULPIT

All due respect to the recent spate of high-profile horror movies to be critically fêted on account of being actually good, but one of the things that The Babadook and It Follows have in common is that they're both immensely well-made versions of something that's already been done. Now, quite unexpectedly, we have the opposite, in the form of Unfriended (which premiered under the name Cybernatural, which simply doesn't do for something made later than 1997, and not a soft-core cable porno). Legitimately, it's as formally radical as any American film in years, and that despite being a genre picture; despite sounding like a slightly tarted-up first-person camera movie, and especially like 2013's The Den, it's only superficially the same thing. It is the rarest of the rare: it has created a totally new set of storytelling tools, laying out the rules for a new kind movie that, a year or two from now, I am hopeful might be used in a really aggressive, challenging way, the first great work of quintessentially Millennial art.

The problem is that Unfriended, aside from inventing a new language, is shit.

But I would like to accentuate the positive for starters, since the things that are bad about Unfriended are common to a great many poor horror films, and the things that are good are almost totally unique. The notion is that high school student Blaire Lily (Shelley Hennig) and her boyfriend Mitch Roussel (Moses Jacob Storm) are all ready to have a fun night of sexually taunting each other on Skype, when their friends Jess Felton (Renee Olstead), Adam Sewell (Will Peltz), and Ken "Kennington" Smith (Jacob Wysocki) jump into the fray, somehow, using computer trickery best described as "the screenwriter wanted it". The five of them banter a bit, getting increasingly annoyed at the sixth individual apparently listening in on their call, trying to figure it out, accusing snotty frenemy Val Rommel (Courtney Halverson) of being the hacker and dragging her into their chat, and only eventually figuring out that what might be going, and since this is a horror film, "might be" = "surely is", is that the dead Laura Barns (Heather Sossaman), who committed suicide one year ago tonight, could be haunting everybody she thinks is responsible for bullying her into killing herself following a humiliating YouTube video that showed her drunk and covered in her own filth. Which does in fact mean that she wants revenge on, basically, the whole school, and I imagine that's to be the sequel hook.

Now, there's nothing special about any of that, except that the whole film is shown as a shot of of Blaire's MacBook desktop. And here's where we must be very specific about what we mean: it's not the footage being shown on Skype, a gimmick that dates at least back to the segment "The Sick Thing That Happened to Emily When She Was Younger" from 2012's V/H/S, and it's not the Skype window with instant messages popping up in front of it, as in The Den. It is, literally, the whole of the desktop, with .jpgs and folders visible around the edges of windows that include Chrome, Skype, Apple iMessage, and Spotify, at least. Which is one important thing already: Unfriended uses name brand programs, and that adds immeasurably to its sense of realism compared to movies that have people using InstaChat and searching on Snoople, or whatever drippy pseudonyms the copyright-dodging screenwriter came up with that week.

That's lovely, but the really exciting thing, what makes Unfriended totally new in my experience, is that it's showing us the unfiltered version of what happens on Blaire's computer: we see the entire record of her life online, with all the various traces of abandoned thoughts on the titles of browser tabs and in her Facebook history, the programs she had open when she started to flirt with Mitch. And other than the appearance of the mouse arrow as she selects what she's focusing on, there's nothing in the movie to guide our eye; we simply get to decide whether it's the actual video of Laura's death we want to stare at, or the sidebar of "also suggested" videos, we can spy on her song playlist. What Unfriended has done is lay out the rules for how a movie can depict and move through that digital space; it has given the foundation to a filmmaker who wants to go for broke and really experiment by making all of that unfocused side detail where the actual storytelling happens, using scraps and errata that we can look at but don't have to, leaving swaths of important character detail spread out across a screen such that we can't see everything and have to prioritise what to look at. Unfriended even starts to be aware of that possibility, as it leaves sometimes up to six different video chat screens playing at once, and not always having the most prominent ones include the most interesting information.

That being said, while I have no doubt that a truly radical experimental narrative shall be made using this aesthetic, Unfriended is absolutely not it - all that wonderful space it leaves itself for squirreling away important bits of information in little side details is wasted on in-jokes and generic filler, the functional equivalent of "lorem ipsum" paragraphs. And it can't even be bothered to keep continuity straight: the action is clarified to take place in April, and we see certain Facebook well-wishes that are time-stamped to "January" and "X hours ago" at different points, all in story that takes place in real time over 80 minutes. There's also a countdown that skips from 10 to 5. So much for hiding interesting details in plain sight.

The plot, meanwhile, is generic "revenge against the obnoxious teenagers" boilerplate, interesting solely in that the exposition is given out of order and throughout the entire movie, so it all seems a bit more mysterious than in your average slasher, where we understand the point of the revenge more or less from the beginning. But a slasher is exactly what it boils down to, including both the regressive sexual morality (we discover that one character isn't a virgin at exactly the point that the movie begins to turn against that character) and the one-word personality types: the Druggie, the Horndog, the Bitch, the Geek, the Bitch (2), and the Hypocrite. Screenwriter Nelson Greaves's desire to structure this as a mystery and give the film a sucker punch twist ending turn into a tawdry trick, thereby trivialising the only thing about the story that had any prayer of being interesting: the film thinks that it's telling a complex tale of how bullying works in the age of social media, pointing out that bullies can be bullied themselves, and that dogpiling is a horrible fucking thing to do to people, no matter how distasteful they are. But its reliance on cheap horror tropes and shabby shocks devalues that theme significantly.

It's painfully unscary - I suspect that watching it on a television or, preferably, a computer might give it more oomph than seeing it in a movie theater possibly could - and includes one of the most contrived death scenes in recent horror cinema (assuming one would, for whatever reason, keep a blender in their bedroom, would it even so be possible to commit suicide with it?). And the filmmakers' enthusiasm for the Kids and their Ways leads ultimately to a deeply misguided climax built around a high-stakes game of "Never Have I Ever" that is bafflingly silly. So, let's be clear, I emphatically do not recommend this film. It's like someone invented the English language by writing The Da Vinci Code. But I do look forward to recommending its most successful knock-offs a few years down the road.

5/10

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SUMMER OF BLOOD: THE 21st CENTURY SLASHER

In my head, Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon is a beloved consensus highlight of 2000s meta-horror that is well understood to be an essential work for genre fans. And maybe that's how it works in the real world, since every review I read about it seems to contain the sentiment "this is such a great film, even though nobody has ever heard of it or seen it", and all those dozens and dozens of reviewers can't have stumbled upon the same microscopic, obscure gem just like that. On the other hand, if the film's cult had any sort of heft to it at all, than producer/director/co-writer Scott Glosserman and co-writer David J. Stieve would have more (any) impressive horror films to their name since Behind the Mask hit the festival circuit in 2006, and leading man Nathan Baesel would have more credits for acting than for working in post-production on reality television shows. The universe is just a cruel prick sometimes, and so, while the dipshits behind stuff like V/H/S have an entire self-reinforcing cottage industry going on for themselves, Glosserman and Stieve, nearly a decade on, have just this one terrific little pearl of a satiric horror-comedy to their name.

But at least they have that. At least we have that. Behind the Mask isn't perfect - it has a doozy of a formal complication baked right into the concept that might not ever have been resolvable in a truly elegant way - but you sit around waiting for a perfect horror film, you starve to death. And there's plenty of outright great material generously littered throughout the film, especially in its absolutely glorious first third, when it becomes the best extant version of the self-examining meta-horror film that had become so popular in the decade following Scream. The film takes place in a universe where Jason Voorhees, Michael Myers, and Freddie Krueger have actually existed to do their killing in the small towns of Crystal Lake, Haddonfield, and Springwood, information communicated to us in a breathless TV news report that turns out to be the opening scene of a documentary being pieced together by Taylor Gentry (Angela Goethals), one-third of a team of graduate student documentary filmmakers (the others are Doug and Todd, played by Ben Pace and Britain Spellings in their limited onscreen appearances; I believe they are, respectively, the cinematographer and sound recordist). Their film is an investigation into the how of all these weirdly elaborate psycho killers who breed like rabbits in this universe, and to answer that question, Taylor has decided to go right to the source: Leslie Vernon (Baesel), who is building himself into the role of mysterious, possibly undead slasher monster for the little town of Glen Echo, Maryland.

The film shifts imperceptibly through two different phases in its first hour: the first part is an extravagantly funny and intelligent "behind the scenes" look into how all the contrivances and straight-up bullshit that go into making slasher movie plots actually involve a shitload of hard work and careful planning on the part of the psychos in question. Vernon is a proud nerd at heart, eager to show off his work, his research, bragging about how he's been carefully stalking his chosen Final Girl, Kelly (Kate Lang Johnson) - he prefers the term "Survivor Girl", which strikes me as the filmmakers being a little contrary just for the sake of it - making her paranoid without actually making her feel unsafe, planting clues about Glen Echo's mysterious (and partially fabricated) tragic history where he knows she'll find it, on top of doing things like working his ass off at cardio to make sure that he can run fast enough to do that "killer who only walks slowly is always just a few paces away" routine.

It's a film for and by people who understand the rules of the slasher movie very well, have some affection for the form, but also recognise that it's basically terrible. And having opened by complimenting those of us in that niche audience for our intelligence and sophistication, the film starts to get really interesting in its middle, and best third, when it ceases to be just one more post-Scream parody of slasher film tropes. Though, to be absolutely clear and absolutely fair, it is far more cutting and inventive in that vein than just about any film I've ever seen, certainly more than the Screams. Glosserman and Stieve have the knack for answering questions that we'd never think to ask, but once we see oh, that's how a psycho slasher killer would do THAT, it's clear and logical and easy to map onto the Jasons and Michaels and their numerous, less iconic brethren. Parts of Behind the Mask are just plain delightful in the way that a caper movie is delightful, as we see puzzle pieces coming into play in ways that are unpredictable and surprising and always, always rewarding.

That, anyway, is the superficial reason for loving the film. The deeper, frankly discomfiting reason, especially if you're a big slasher fan (and the movie relies on you being so, both to make its most impact and simply so that you get all the jokes), is that Behind the Mask rather craftily and invisibly turns itself around on the viewer through the form of its internal filmmakers, asking without voicing the words, "so anyway, why do you watch this shit?" There comes a point when Taylor... not exactly realises that she's filming the preparations of a terrifically friendly, funny geek who is, that night, going to murder at least seven teenagers, but more realises that she already realised it a little while ago. And then the film becomes explicitly about the ethics of filming a criminal act that the documentarian has the means to stop, but implicitly, and far more rewardingly, about the ethics of entertainment based in violent, elaborate death - something that, incidentally, Behind the Mask almost completely lacks. Only one of its fourteen actual or "what if?" deaths can be legitimately described as gory, and that's largely because it's paying off a silly one-off line about post-hole diggers from much earlier in the film.

I've seen the film three times now, and I'm still distinctly aware that I haven't unpacked everything going in on that middle chunk, as it implicates the viewer, and confounds its own status as a work of art. Vernon explains to an increasingly incredulous Taylor why all of the baroque elements of his work are necessary, how his entire focus is on empowering the Survivor Girl while also depriving her of her femininity, in terms that reek of medically outdated psychoanalytic lit theory, providing an intellectual spine for "doing slashers" that's plausible viewed from one angle, puffed-up double-talk from another; the film manages to discuss in easy, bite-sized form some of the weightier pro-horror arguments that have been offered and give them quite a bit of validation, and at the same time to make those arguments seem forced. "But aren't you really just excited to watch people die?" the film asks. "And don't you wonder if that kind of makes you a bad person?" There's even a gratuitous boob shot that's called out as gratuitous and then allowed to linger in a way that feels more self-aware and self-critical about male gazes than any other gratuitous boob shoot I've seen in a slasher movie.

The other important thing going on is that Behind the Mask really asserts itself not as a movie about the life of a slasher killer, but a movie about making a movie about a slasher killer. Between its 2006 premiere and its insultingly tiny 2007 theatrical release, the film came out too early to be consciously commenting on the "found footage" trend that exploded just a year later, though it's not really aping found footage to start with. Rather, when we see things through the camera's perspective, as we do for the great majority of the first hour, we're being put in the perspective of spectators of that footage - which is a dumb tautology, of course. Any time you watch a movie, you're a spectator of footage. But in Behind the Mask, there's not just documentary footage: the first scene, and a couple of moments dotted across the first hour, take place "outside" the documentary footage. And this makes the film different from virtually all found footage movies, where the entirety of the film takes place "within" the footage. The action of Behind the Mask takes place in a reality, and the film crew stands within that reality, filming it; when we then watch their footage, we're subtly being situated within that reality as well, since we know that the footage is a thing to be watched inside the film's universe, and we're watching the footage, and so it goes. And this makes us complicit with the film to a degree that we virtually never get to be with movies: not that we are present with the action and thus able to prevent, because that's just stupid. But because we become conspicuously aware that the footage has been made in order for us to watch it.

It's heady stuff, but it's also the direct cause of the film's greatest failure, and one that is completely inevitable. The peculiar effect of watching the footage as being separate from watching the movie only works because the film divides itself between "reality" and "filmed-reality"; but that exact same division cheapens the film. Every single time the movie shifts out of the camera's perspective into a more normal "horror movie" aesthetic (it's completely open about this, the lighting and video quality both dramatically change, and there's suddenly a musical score) it's jarring and feels somewhat arbitrary. To me, anyway. And then we come to the last third, when Taylor, finally thrown into moral awakening, aware that abstracting this killer's actions through the lens of cinema has been a tool to remove herself from the ramifications of filming and watching those actions, announces that the documentary is over - and just like that, the documentary is over. The rest of the film plays out in the top-level reality of polished lighting, classical visual vocabulary, and ominous music. It moves through the third act of every single slasher on the books, and let me be frank, it moves through that act beautifully. As a conventional slasher film, the last third of Behind the Mask is really one of the best out there. But it's also a conventional slasher film.

I truly don't think there was a way to "solve" that, so I'm not harping on the filmmakers for not doing it. The end of Behind the Mask is a logical and inevitable extension of everything that was set up before: countless little Chekov guns fire off, and there's one piece of foreshadowing that pays off because it specifically wasn't mentioned, which is a really awesome way of teasing the viewer's genre savviness (I don't want to give away things, so I'm putting it in spoiler bars, in all his chatter about gender metaphors, Leslie conveniently fails to mention to Taylor that the increasingly masculine Final Girl tends to have an androgynous name, something Kelly lacks). But after the complexity, the wit, and the astonishing versatility of Baesel's performance, veering from giddy enthusiast to unexpected sorrow and introspection to dead-eyed menace, even a very good conventional slasher ending feels like it's letting all the air out of a movie that has been, till that point, one of the boldest examinations I know of what viewers demand of the narrative, of the characters, and of themselves as they watch horror movies. It has a fine ending, but nonetheless a disappointing one.

But then it goes ahead and resolves its plot during the end credits: not a little bonus, but an actual scene without which the narrative of the whole is, though satisfying, literally incomplete. And so, having once again bent the reality of "what is the 'actual' movie and what isn't?" one last time - and with a Talking Heads song, on top of it! - the film gets itself back in my good graces for its final bow.

Anyway, it's funny, it's legitimately tense, and it's smart as all hell, and it's one of my favorite American horror movies of the 21st Century. Not a lot of competition for that title, we all understand, but a damned impressive film anyway, and badly in need of a bigger fanbase and more love until that glorious day when it finally asserts its birthright as a modern horror classic.

Body Count: 10, three of whom are also seen in a theoretical "what if they died this way?" flashforward. Also one person who dies in the same theoretical flashforward, but not in "reality".

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SUMMER OF BLOOD BONUS: MORE SLASHER PARODIES

You know how in slasher movies, sexually active teenagers are killed? Congratulations, you have all the information you need in order to have written Student Bodies, a slasher movie parody from 1981, the earliest year in which "slasher parody" is something we could even conceivably talk about (added bonus points for being released by Paramount, the studio responsible for Friday the 13th itself). The explosion of the subgenre had only started a year prior, after all, and wouldn't start to enter its ridiculous, decadent phase for a couple of years more. But it was apparently enough time for the unyielding formula of the genre to make itself sufficiently widely known that a comedy could be made where the main thrust of the jokes were making fun of that formula, fifteen years before Wes Craven and Kevin Williamson got all the credit for doing the same thing in Scream.

Scream, though, is a slasher film that is aware of itself; Student Bodies is no more a slasher than Airplane! is a disaster movie. It's a straight-up comedy using the form of another genre as a joke in and of itself, as though merely pointing out that slashers do this or that hackneyed thing is itself funny. Which translates into a number of dully literal jokes, like when a soon-to-be victim leaves the front door unlocked, only for the film to cut to a close-up of the doorknob with the word "UNLOCKED" superimposed, with an arrow pointing to the knob. Or one of the film's most famous tricks, which is flashing the running tally of dead bodies every time a new victim is killed. Because, you see, pointing out that people are murdered in a slasher movie is funny, n'est-ce pas? When Hot Shots! Part Deux pulled out the same kind of general idea in 1993, it was at least in a gag that had a shape, momentum, and payoff. Other than flashing 6½ when a fly gets smacked, Student Bodies never can be bothered to make its body counter do anything besides exist.

That's true of a discouraging amount of humor in the film: point out that slasher films do something, punch it up with a bit of cartoony exaggeration, and settle down to let the laffs roll in. It's hardly as bitterly dispiriting as the Friedberg & Seltzer school of parody-making, in which the jokes are variations on, "Do you recognise this piece of pop cultural ephemera? Well here is for your recognition!" At least everything that happens in Student Bodies is germane to the slasher film genre, which notoriously isn't true of any of the Scary Movie films. Still, jokes take work, they must be built and drawn out of scenarios and characters, or at least have enough absurd incongruity that they take you by surprise. It's not inherently funny to just go "THIS THING. HA HA, AMIRIGHT?", and that's where Student Bodies spends a lot of its time.

The film tells of a murder spree that befalls the senior class at Lamab High shortly before prom: a peeping tom and prank caller identified as the Breather (Jerry Belson, one of the few cast members to have any kind of acting career outside of this one movie) is stalking and killing several of the hottest, most sexually active young woman in school, killing them and their boyfriends immediately after or immediately before they have sex. Suspicion immediately fall on the androgynously-named Toby (Kristen Riter), the most aggressively virginal girl in school (she wears a pin flatly stating "No"), but nobody in the community or the school takes a serious enough view of the murders to do much to stop it. Leaving Toby alone to actively investigate what the hell is going on in her weird little world of disturbed teachers and horrible students. And what the hell is going on descends into muddled surrealism during a sloppy, anything-goes final act: more, one suspects, because the movie was a jerry-rigged non-union project crapped out during a writer's strike (producer-directed Michael Ritchie had to hide behind the pseudonym "Allen Smithee", Belson took the name "Richard Brando" and received no credit for co-writing the script; co-writer Mickey Rose is credited as both sole writer and director), that needed to be resolved in a hurry, than because anybody involved in the making of it though that free-flowing Lynchian surrealism - not that "Lynchian" was a word yet - was clearly the way to go.

The casual incoherence and lack of stakes with which the story is presented is obviously the point; the filmmakers' way of poking fun at the paint-by-numbers slasher formula by depriving it of any actual content beyond scenes of people dying intercut with scenes of people waiting to die. What they choose to fill all that deadspace is where the problems and occasional triumphs occur: as a series of sarcastic jokes at the expense of a hackneyed genre, Student Bodies lives and dies on the strength of whether those jokes are funny. Frequently, as I've suggested, I find that they're not; and that's without pausing to mention the amount of basement-level scatological humor that crops up, a strange and unmotivated introduction into what claims to be a slasher parody. Certainly, a scene in which a corpse's farts propel its gurney out of a room like a rocket sled is not what any of us would naturally expect from a movie satirising the predictibility of Friday the 13th and its copycats. Almost as bad is the Breather: the slobbering, cartoon panting noises that give him his name are amusing enough in small doses, but then he has to open his mouth and start rattling off an ironic commentary on what's happening to him, in the shticky tones of a flailing Borscht Belt comic. It's irritating as hell, and not funny in the least, and the scenes that focus on the Breather tend to crush the fragile momentum of a film with far too indulgent, lanky pacing. And far too many random stop-offs for product placement, above and beyond anything that makes a micron of sense for a low-budget niche parody of a niche genre.

The film is far better off when it abandons parody, or even straightforward comedy, to go for full-throated absurdity; the best joke by far is a weird non-diegetic scene in which the bloodless, fully-clothed movie realises that nobody will see it if it's not rated R, and earns itself that rating. Most of the best peaks amidst the general mediocrity are similarly divorced from anything besides the impulse to be silly and strange: Toby's non-sequitur driven conversation with the school psychiatrist (Carl Jacobs), the scene that most feels like something out of the Airplane! school of ridiculous straight-faced nonsense, or almost anything to do with the rubber-limbed janitor Malvert, the most cultishly adored of all this cult movie's individual elements, mostly because of the irresistible mystery surrounding the identity of the actor playing him (he's credited as "The Stick", appeared in no other movies, and has been provisionally identified as the late Patrick Boone Varnell, who passed away in May, 1989). But there's such a disorienting sense of the completely otherworldly about Malvert, and the way that he's performed as a kind of hybrid of Charlie Chaplin and Jack Skellington, it's incredibly easy to find him fascinating, even if very little about him is "funny" funny. (The film's cult also adores the shop teacher, played by Joe Flood, and his obsession with horse head bookends, but I couldn't follow the cult anywhere near that running gag).

The bulk of the film, though, is a slog through broad potty and sex jokes, surface-level satire, and the misplaced conviction that being loud is the same as being funny. I am aware that Student Bodies has its enthusiastic fans, and I am happy for them, but for all the historical value of a parody that came out so early in the cycle of slasher films, helping us to identify exactly what was already being discussed around the genre in its earliest years, it's just not very enjoyable or funny. And those things are fairly vital for comedies.

Body Count: 13, and thanks to the movie for taking all the fun out of it for me. Also one fly, and one horse head bookend.

Conspicuously Placed Products: 7, with some of them - Dr. Pepper in particular - getting placed multiple times.

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SUMMER OF BLOOD: HORROR IN THE LATE '90s, or: SNOWMAN'S LAND

Those of you who've been around for a while have undoubtedly picked up on my certain disdain for movies that play the "we know we're making a bad movie, so it's actually funny that our movie is bad" card. And oh my Lord, does the 1997 direct-to-video Jack Frost lean on that conceit as unrelentingly as it possibly can. I'd say that it's just the usual post-Scream meta-horror nonsense, except that based on the dates involved, I'm pretty certain that there was no time for Jack Frost to have been influenced by that slasher satire. So nope, the filmmakers managed to come up with this one all on their own, bless their hearts.

I am not, of course, claiming that Jack Frost should have been made with a great deal of sincerity and seriousess. It's a film about a serial killer cannibal whose body merges with snow and leaves him a murderous, psychopathic snowman. I am among those who subscribes to the philosophy that there are no poor ideas for movies, only poor execution, but "psycho snowman slasher" is an idea that's close enough to objectively poor that a deliberate self-parody is probably the only approach that might have been acceptable even a little bit. The film is comedy as much as it is horror; I think it's important to acknowledge that, because the last thing one ever wants to do is to arrive in the position that others might accuse him of not "getting" Jack Frost, of all damn movies. For I understand it has quite the appreciative cult following these days.

But it's one thing to get the movie, and another to enjoy the experience on any level whatsoever, and this is where Jack Frost loses me. Indeed, it's largely because it's so open about its own conceptual badness, and the poverty of its execution, and the general stupidity of all the things onscreen that I found it rather enervating to watch. When you're confronted with something so obviously unacceptable as Jack Frost, the best thing to do is to mock it; this is the crux of bad movie fandom. But there's simply no fun at all in mocking a movie that comes as pre-digested as this, making all of its own jokes at its own expense, insisting on its own insincerity, flaunting the shabbiness of its effects work. Jack Frost is a movie that doesn't require a viewer, in essence. And there's something intensely alienating about dealing with such a prospect.

But deal with it we shall. Things open promisingly enough, with some genuinely creative opening credits that showcase all the actors and crew heads' names on ornaments on a Christmas tree, as an unseen and uncredited Uncle Henry tells a holiday story to his niece, who has asked for something both happy and scary. And things cease to be promising, because the (obviously adult) actor voicing the niece elected to pitch her voice at such a squeaky whine that it takes all of five or six syllables before listening to her has become completely, absolutely intolerable. Thankfully, this narrative framework never reappears, and nobody in the actual cast is half as obnoxious, but it's a quick, easy way for the movie to earn itself some enemies even before it has shown the first human being.

The story Uncle Henry tells is, he claims, set in more or less real time, as a famous killer named Jack Frost (Scott MacDonald) - his actual birth name, we are led to believe, which speaks ill of his parents - is being trucked from prison to the execution site, which isn't how executions work. But movies need beginnings, and there are plenty of other reasons to be mad at the plot later on. What happens, in a nutshell, is that Frost manages to kill one of his guards, and in the confusion the execution truck plows into a tanker from a genetic research company, allowing Jack to escape just long enough to get doused in a jet of some kind of outrageously caustic acid that melts his flesh and bone down to nothing, and the liquid that used to be the killer merges with snow. And then starts throbbing.

The action then cuts to Snowmonton, the snowman capital of the world, as it pretty much would have to be. Here, it is time for the annual snowman contest, which is apparently such a big deal that every molecule of frozen water has been swept from the city streets to form the snowmen being carved in the town square, because Snowmonton is, in virtually every shot we see throughout the film, totally devoid of snow. In fairness, that was just a freak accident - among the man one-liners peppering the end credits, we see references to freak weather that left Big Bear Lake, California totally devoid of winter during the period that Jack Frost's producers had arranged to shoot there. Such are the vicissitudes of no-budget filmmaking.

Anyway, in this sleepy little town, we find the local sheriff Sam Tiler (Christopher Allport), who happens to have been the exact law enforcement agent to take down Frost in the first place. He has these many months been plagued by doubts concerning a threat the killer left that he would take his revenge, and apparently has been worried all along that Frost would find a way to escape. He probably didn't assume that way would involve becoming a sentient matrix of H₂O who can melt or freeze at will, and spends most of his time in the form of a snowman completed by Sam's son Ryan (Zack Eginton), with his coal eyes and carrot nose following along as he morphs, despite neither coal nor carrots being subject to the same freezing point as water.

Sam's laconic presence and his friendly relationship with the Snowmontonians having put us squarely in Twin Peaks territory (an impression solidified by the scenes set in the cutesily ineffectual sheriff's office), it only makes sense when the film starts copying from The X-Files as well, in the form of a secret government conspiracy to retrieve Frost. And so we have FBI Agent Manners (Stephen Mendel) and a scientist named Stone (Rob LaBelle) onhand to be mysterious and get in Sam's way, and not tell him any of the things he might need to ensure that his community doesn't end up entirely dead. Though they have no way of guessing at the scope of Frost's abilities to manipulate his form, which includes being able to shoot dagger-sharp icicles on top of everything else.

There's no point in harping on how stupid this is, since the film already knows that - since the film, in fact, prides itself on being stupid. But it's still not very entertaining to watch. "Bad on purpose" goes only as far as the filmmakers' sense of humor and irony, and the creators of Jack Frost - who are largely just Michael Cooney (director and writer) and Jeremy Paige (producer and co-scenarist) - have some pretty lead-footed jokes up their sleeve. Frost is a quipster killer: he has to be, since the budget permitted only a really dodgy snowman puppet whose mouth barely moves, and which is otherwise not articulated. So we get a lot of one-liners, most of which aren't funny at all, and some of which don't even make sense. At one point, for example, Frost has taken over a victim's body, but gives up and allows himself to be vomited out. Having thus reformed, he snarks "Don't eat yellow snow!", à propos of nothing happening in that moment. I suppose there are only so many thematically tight puns a snowman killer can make, but some semblance of a relationship between ideas would have been appreciated.

That relationship holds true for essentially everything in the movie. The plot, at its most basic, is a "killer comes back for revenge" situation, but most of Frost's actions have no motivation at all. He kills an old man with absolutely no connection to anything in the rest of the movie; he then merciless hunts down all the members of a family who happen to live in Snowmonton, but are otherwise quite uninvolved in Sam's life. Although the last surviving member of that family, Jill (Shannon Elizabeth), is preparing to have sex with her boyfriend (Darren Campbell) in Sam's house when Frost catches up with her and kills her, so that's kind of a thing that is in any way part of the story. This is after Frost goes all the way out of town to kill a deputy (Brian Leckner) and still his police cruiser.

It feels like one thing only: an attempt to inflate a running time by adding in a bunch of spurious deaths, pure slasher movie boilerplate. It's funny only in that it's insincere, and because Frost can't help but say zany things; I feel like it's a movie for people who absolutely adored the later Nightmare on Elm Street movies, the ones where Freddy Krueger had largely turned into a murdering stand-up comedian; it shares their disregard for cohesion and absolutely ghastly wordplay. So it's much too jokey to work for even a single scene as horror (though I can imagine the more squeamish being thrown for a loop by Frost's initial disintegration, or by his ultimate demise), with its crap one-liners and its straitlaced absurdity, and its electronic keyboard score borrowing heavily and ironically from traditional Christmas carols. And it's much too shouty, snotty, and mean to be effect as comedy. Perhaps with more tastelessness, as in the early work of Peter Jackson, this could have been something; but the filmmakers couldn't afford to be tasteless. The scene where Frost rapes Jill to death is tasteless, I suppose, but not in the right way, not at all. I was mostly glad that the filmmakers refrained from having that rape come in the form of him penetrating her with his carrot nose, as the blocking seemed eager to foreshadow at one point; but the point where we arrive at "it was such a relief when it didn't include the most objectionable possible rape scene", we have scraped through the bottom of the barrel and dug a rather comfortably-sized hole in the ground beneath it.

I will concede that there are things about I liked. Allport's plain, taciturn performance actually works pretty well - it's the only thing in the entire movie that feels like it actually falls in the "played straight for laughs" register that the film's fanbase sees in every detail. And I greatly admired the hammy sassiness of Marsha Clark as the sheriff's office secretary. Cooney also did a surprisingly good job placing the camera, considering the scale of the production: both in his cleverness in hiding the snow-free locations, and in stagins some genuinely inventive visual jokes, something for which I was deeply grateful amidst all the arch irony.

Anyway, it is the most perfect late-'90s horror film imaginable: gimmicky to the point of idiocy, and post-modern in the most irritating conceivable way, an equal failure of both horror and comedy. If it at least came by its badness honestly, its ineptitude and styrofoam-covered-in-felt snowman suit might have at least been charming; but as it is, the film's self-awareness just makes it tediously smug.

Body Count: 12, though one is more implied than shown, and also the 38 murders Frost committed prior to the film's opening, which is a massively cheap way to make your killer seem more dangerous than we ever see him onscreen.

* * * * *

But wait! What about that OTHER terrifying movie from the late '90s called Jack Frost?

It says everything that the titular character character from the 1997 Jack Frost is the soul of a serial killer, who turned his victims into meat pies, inhabiting a snowman who murders people, including one whose face he bites off with his icicle teeth, and he can't be compared even a little bit to the visceral, Lovecraftian horror of the titular character from the 1998 Jack Frost, which is a fantasy movie for children.

Basically, it's a horrible Christmas-themed version of the musical Carousel (or, if you want to be snooty, the play Liliom, upon which Carousel was based), in which a middle-aged man on the cusp of his big break as a rock star ignores his son, dies, is reincarnated as a snowman, and learns how to be a better father. It's entirely possible that this would work, somewhat, if the snowman wasn't voiced by Michael Keaton, an actor who is frequently capable of greatness, but whose line deliveries tend towards an edgy, tightly-coiled energy that suggest somebody ready to blow just underneath the words; and given Jack Frost's tendency to speak largely in snow-related quips (seriously, the two Jack Frost pictures are fucking indistinguishable, except that in one of them the bully loses a snowball fight, and in the other the bully is decapitated with a sled), this makes him seem like a bent rage addict funneling all his anger into caustic humor (it's way too reminiscent of the performance he gave in Beetlejuice, actually, and that's just not okay). There's one particularly grim moment of soul-sucking wordplay where the snowman and his son are celebrating a shared triumph, and Jack says, "You da man!", because remember, this was made in the late '90s, and his son Charlie (Joseph Cross) replies, "No, you da man!", and Jack quips back, "Nope! I'm the snowman! HAH HAH HAH". And as lamentable as that pun is, and emblematic of how dire and insulting the bulk of Mark Steven Johnson's screenplay is, the part that really goes from, "oh, what a routinely lousy children's movie", to "GOD GET IT OFF ME IT'S BURNING" is that fake, forced laugh, Keaton coughing out the sounds of mirth so unnaturally that if he had immediately turned around and ripped the boy's head off with his eerie branch arms with their floppy, flat little mitten hands, it would have been infinitely more understandable than the filmmakers' desire that we find this cute.

So Keaton's a problem. But even he is only the second-biggest liability in the film, for he is but the voice and briefly-human precursor of Jack the Snowman, an eldritch abomination if I ever did see one. It's a singularly persuasive piece of machinery built by the Jim Henson Creature Shop (there are a few shots in which it is played by a glossy CGI effect, as well), but "persuasive" means here only that it is convincing in its movements as something living, not that it actually convinces as an animated snowman. And it fails even more at seeming even slightly appealing or friendly - it looks like a perversity of nature, moving its horrible, rubbery mouth and flexing its horrible, overly expressive facial features, and staring with its unpleasantly small eyes that look pitch black (black as coal, you might say) in all but bright, direct light, in which case you can see the glue-grey irises around the edges of those eyes. And begad, if the deep black eyes with nothing behind them but the infinity of death are freaky, the eyes with just enough detail to look vaguely human are much, much worse.

Other than the fact that its protagonist was issued from a rank pit of Hell to torment the godly, Jack Frost is actually pretty blandly generic kiddie filmmaking, with no story really deserving of the name: Jack was so busy with his career that he almost missed Christmas, but decided just in the nick of time to head to be with his son and wife Gabby (Kelly Preston). But a freak snowstorm hit, and he crashed his car and died. He died on Christmas Day. If nothing else, I admire it for having the balls to go there. The snowballs, I would say, except that the movie already makes, like, five puns about snow balls, and I don't want to relive them.

So anyway, Jack comes back and life lessons, though the stakes of the film are so ungodly low that I couldn't really tell you why the universe would bother bending its rules to make this miracle happen. And Charlie himself seems largely unmoved; the emotional beats, at least as they are played by the actors and director Troy Miller, would be entirely unchanged if Jack had simply disappeared for months after a boring, run-of-the-mill divorce (an impression strengthened by how very little Preston gets to do, mostly just looking alarmed in reaction shots and never interacting with the snowman until the film's penultimate scene). There's absolutely no overarching plot, simply scenes during which the snowman thaws Charlie's resentment, and eventually teaches him some hockey tips, and then when enough scenes have transpired to make a feature, there's a brief race against time leading arbitrarily into a desultory wrap-up, suggesting that Johnson understood that copying E.T. was a safe bet, but didn't care why.

It is, unsurprisingly, not very good cinema. Miller and the hilariously overqualified cinematographer László Kovács (the things that happened to that man's career after the 1980s started up are indescribably depressing) are hellbent on close-ups that use the anamorphic frame in the most artless way: a lot of heads just kind of bobbing around in oppressive widescreen space. There are some clumsy attempts at kinetic editing, and the most aesthetically distinctive thing about the film is its unusually brutish soundtrack, beginning with a hard-rock cover of "Frosty the Snowman" played by Jack's band, moving on past a dumbfounding use of Fleetwood Mac's melancholic and not at all child-appropriate "Landslide", apparently because it has the words "snow-covered" in the lyrics, and arriving at a singularly unforgivable cover of "Gimme Some Lovin'" by Hanson, because remember, this was made in the late '90s.

Basically, it is everything I have ever hated about children's entertainment combined in one place: canned emotions and deadening plot points of the utmost predictability crammed together with shrill, sardonic anti-humor and a lazy reliance on musical montages to paper over the sucking holes in the conflict. Add the viscerally unappealing central character, and the whole thing is just the absolute pits. It took a lot to be the worst reincarnation fantasy titled Jack Frost from the second half of the 1990s, but by golly, they found a way.

Body Count: Just the one.

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SUMMER OF BLOOD: ITALIAN SLASHERS

1982's The New York Ripper is a very, very, very special motion picture: it represents the exact moment at which the great Italian horror master Lucio Fulci transformed into the hacky Italian schlockmeister Lucio Fulci. The transition was achieved very cleanly: outside of two scenes which could stand along any giallo of the '70s for visual flair and psychologically bent terror, the film bears not a trace of the poetically gory hands of the man who just one year before had wrapped up his celebrated Gates of Hell trilogy with The Beyond and The House by the Cemetery.

We'll get back to that; in the meantime, let's ease into the thing. The New York Ripper opens with an elderly man (Sal Carollo) and his dog, the man shot in such disorientingly tight, pinched close-ups that I thought for certain that he was being set up as some demented figure who'd play a considerable role in the sick drama to follow, and not just a dude who would literally never appear again after the opening credits. All he's there for is to be part of a game of fetch gone wrong, when his dog brings back a rotting hand. This hand becomes the problem of NYPD officer Lt. Fred Williams (Jack Hedley), who you can tell just from looking at him is one of those world-weary sorts who has seen it all, and found all of it depraved and wanting. The kind who can reel off the statistic that eleven people are murdered in his jurisdiction every day, half of them women, and do so with the sort of bored, slumped posture that suggests he has no more emotional stake in that fact than he does in the Mets' current woes.

What Williams doesn't know is that he's just been given a serial killer case, or should I say he's been handed the case, because y'know, the fact that there was a hand, it's like a pun. In fact, New York is about to be plagued by a series of killings committed by a person whose only persistent identifiable characteristic is a tendency to speak in a voice like a psychopathic Donald Duck. A more psychopathic Donald Duck, anyway. After the next violently mutilated body shows up, of a woman (Cinzia de Ponti) slashed through the genitals, Williams calls in an expert on maniacs, Dr. Paul Davis (Paolo Malco) of Columbia University. The two of them begin to develop a plan to find and stop the killer, though Williams is so hard-boiled and resigned to a world of shit, and Davis so generally callous, that neither of them are trying very hard. Eventually, the case starts to break when one victim, Fay Majors (Almanta Keller) manages to survive wounds, and with her boyfriend Peter (Andrew Occhipinti, under the American market friendly name of Andrew Painter) begins to endure an entire series of failed attempts by the Quacking Ripper on her life. Though even this proves to be less use than it immediately seems; the man she's able to identify as her attacker, Mikis Kalenda (Howard Ross) is revealed rather soon after to us as merely the procurer for the actual Ripper, finding the kind of "dirty" or otherwise morally compromised women that the killer prefers.

In its bones, then, this is basically just a routine giallo, a nice urban murder mystery. It came out in the Slasher Era, which means that the focus is less on psychological discombobulation (the spine of all the very best gialli), and more on evocative, high-impact violence, but it's not like the gialli were exactly squeamish about such matters. Still, the quantity and degree of the violence in The New York Ripper is quite impressive: enough to get the film banned in Britain during the Video Nasties days, despite it not being on the Nasties list itself. In fact, the violence in the film is so prominent and so pronounced in its impact that it's kind of hard to talk about anything else. That is, in fact, the nugget of the argument of the faction that decries the film as lesser, if not indeed outright terrible Fulci (having developed a good-sized cult in the years after its toxic early reception, this remains the most divisive of the director's movies): that it is nothing but an exercise in watching brutal acts of highly creative and wicked acts of violence against women, a torture porn film years and years before anybody even thought of suggesting that was a genre. It's no fun to side with the prudes, but I absolutely have to, in this case: The New York Ripper is a squalid, joyless exercise in extreme gore, with a ridiculous fig leaf at the end when it reveals the killer and explains his motives in a way that could potentially serve as a sign that the movie is indicting acts of male violence against women, if only it didn't come after the specific 85 minutes of cinema preceding that reveal.

I am irresistibly drawn to compare the film to William Lustig's Maniac from two years earlier, for the two films resemble each other closely. Both are set in a version of New York that focuses on the shabbiest, filthiest corners of that city during one of the nastier periods in its history, and both depict acts of horrifying cruelty against women. Neither is a film that's much fun to watch in anyway, and anybody suggesting that it might be is probably worth avoiding in small group settings, but for all that it is a sick, slimy affair, Maniac at least feels like it has some depth and purpose. It's rubbing our faces in the worst of humanity with the exact point of making us feel degraded and awful about it; it comes from a place of thematic and sociological nihilism, but it has themes and sociology. The New York Ripper doesn't manage quite the same feat: it depicts more disgusting acts but with less visceral implication of the viewer. It presents torture for us to watch, it doesn't assault us with torture. And because of this, it's basically an empty exercise. Not that, God knows, I think that every good horror film needs to make us feel awful about death and violence, or anything like that. I am a huge, even starry-eyed fan of The Beyond, which has plenty of extreme and foul-minded scenes of violence, and it makes absolutely no claims to thematic depth at all. But it has artistry behind it: it imparts mood using its visuals about as well as any horror film I can name, and even if it's basically just spectacle, it's spectacle that's emotionally transporting. The New York Ripper is just a wallow in bad behavior, too wearying to even make one angry. It's not in the least scary, it's gross. Emphatically and unapologetically gross, and there's no art to that.

The gulf between The New York Ripper and Maniac, or The Beyond, or a hundred other, better violent horror movies, is typified by its sex show scene. By the mere fact that it has a sex show scene, in which a woman named Eva (Zora Kerova) and a man with no name at all (Urs Althaus) are onstage in one of the seediest adult theaters in the blighted hellhole of early-'80s Times Square, having sex for an audience that includes Kalenda, and a smartly-dressed woman we'll later learn is called Jane Lodge (Alexandra Delli Colli), the latter of whom masturbates while watching, the camera cutting from the sex act she's watching to extreme close-ups of her mouth twisting in pleasure. Which is, to be fair, the most classy, artful way to film a scene of a woman masturbating at a Times Square live sex show that you could possibly hope for.

But then, the question arises, is this actually a scene that a film like The New York Ripper requires? If so, is it a scene that needs to go on for as long as it does (notably, most of the censorship the film has undergone pertains to its sex, not its violence - which opens up a whole other conversation, but still)? Probably not and no, respectively. And even then, the scene is a masterpiece of narrative concision compared to the later scene in which Jane is foot-raped in a bar. These are lingering, sordid moments, ones where sex is glared at with a blank, disinterested focus by the filmmakers, and it feels more like something out of a Joe D'Amato picture than anything I'd associate with Fulci in his prime. Not a complimentary comparison, in case the name "Joe D'Amato" doesn't mean anything to you right off.

Having thus telegraphed its willingness to stomp around in the most gratuitous kind of sex and linger on sexual humiliation in what I think might be a scene played for comedy, the film thus gets that much ickier when the time comes to kill Jane off - this came as an unpleasant development to me, for her first handful of scenes, I was actually expecting her to turn out to be the real Ripper, since there was no obvious reason otherwise for her to take up so much screentime (and sure enough, she's absolutely not an important enough character for the energy the film takes in building her up) - and does so with a level of unblinking violence that outdoes anything else I have seen in Fulci. Including what might be the single most upsetting moment of eye violence in the filmography of a director who treated eye violence the way Spielberg treats shooting stars. It's immaculately staged, and brilliantly executed - on the level of craft, I'll cop to being in absolute awe of it - but it's so leering, so filthy, and so distasteful in the context of how the film views women and Jane in particular, it's not valuable or entertaining, it's just pitiless and rancid.

That the killer speaks like Donald Duck immediately connects The New York Ripper with 1972's Don't Torture a Duckling, whose Italian title contains a more explicit reference to the Disney character. That film is one Fulci's greatest works, though not because it kindly; where The New York Ripper is cruel, Don't Torture a Duckling is outright nihilistic. But that nihilism develops cleanly from the film's unrelenting social commentary, and I kept hoping, right up to the pretty much indefensible close-up of Jane's nipple being cut in half by a razor blade, that the link between the two films on the Donald level mean that The New York Ripper would eventually turn into something similar. It doesn't; there's the outline of a something about men wanting women to be impossibly perfect, but if I were inclined to defend the movie, it would be out of admiration that it pulls no punches and knows exactly what it is, not because it has any meaningful level of thematic depth or sophistication.

And there's another line of defense, I guess: unlike all of the later Fulci films I've seen, The New York Ripper is actually well-made. Even extremely well-made: it was the second and last film Fulci made (after a gap of eleven years!) with cinematographer Luigi Kuveiller, a great talent in the Italian film industry of the '70s, and his depiction of the squalor of New York and the nightmarish corners of it is fantastic; there's a brief scene in a subway with screaming red lights that is the most inspired part of the entire movie, almost solely through its lighting, and a weird sequence in a movie theater where the mood lighting is almost as important as Fulci's staging of the unseen film as a surrealist collage of sounds (I mentioned two great scenes in my opening paragraph: there you have them). So no matter what's going on, the film looks fantastic. And as a police procedural and mystery, Fulci and crew keep the film tight and tense, with Hedley doing excellent work as the bleak, weathered Williams (Malco's Davis - eventually revealed to be gay in a very bizarre and pointless scene that I think is meant to explain his amoral glossing over the dead women - is much less consistent or interesting). That the film eventually follows slasher rules rather than giallo rules in outing and disposing of its killer means that this angle on the film is a bit of a dead end, but it's pretty great while it lasts. Nothing else is, though; I could possibly attempt to overlook everything vile in the film if it was genuinely horrifying, but The New York Ripper is ultimately more rote and banal in its storytelling than it is repellent, and that's the worst kind of combination.

Body Count: 6, which is almost exactly the right number for a Ripper-based thriller. I am not counting the dead body at the very beginning of the movie, of which we see only a hand.

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