The Slumber Party Massacre Trilogy

THE SLUMBER PARTY MASSACRE
(R, New World Pictures, 77 mins., release date: Nov. 12, 1982)

SLUMBER PARTY MASSACRE II
(R, Concorde Pictures, 75 mins., release date: Oct. 30, 1987)

SLUMBER PARTY MASSACRE III
(Unrated, New Concorde Pictures, 87 mins., release date: Sept. 7, 1990)


You have to admire the Roger Corman-produced Slumber Party Massacre series in providing the exploitation cinema's equivalent of affirmative action. The glass ceiling of schlock was shattered in 1982 when Amy Holden Jones made her feature debut, having worked up the ladder from assisting Martin Scorsese on Taxi Driver to becoming a prolific film editor, even turning down the prospect of cutting together Spielberg's stellar E.T. - The Extra Terrestrial to have a go behind the camera. Not only that, but Jones was fascinated by a script from Rita Mae Brown, an activist/novelist in the feminist and lesbian societies. Never mind that in the same year, another first-time director named Amy was at the forefront of the definitive teen comedy Fast Times at Ridgemont High (whose most memorable song cue is recycled in the trailer for the first film, suprisingly), as we were still in the era of the Dead Teenager Movie, and there was a marked estrogen famine in that quick-buck field.

Thus New World Pictures' original The Slumber Party Massacre, with its familiar-sounding title and proverbial slasher scenario, managed a cult reputation as subversive and satirical. Jones and Brown have made a film with a predominantly female cast, all of whom are uninhibited in their bodies and attitude to the point of parody, and their persistent panicked screams are matched by the rather wimpy male characters. Even the killer, an unmasked sanitarium escapee brandishing a portable power drill, is taken down a beg by Freudian means.

It all begins so demurely, as Trish Devereaux (Michelle Michaels) rises from bed on the eve of her eighteenth birthday, inspecting her budding figure in front of the closet mirror and clearing her dresser drawer of girlish trinkets like stuffed animals and plastic dolls. Trish's parents are heading off for a vacation, conveniently affording her the chance to invite her close friends on the basketball team over for a pajama party with plenty of alcohol, marijuana and pizza. One of Trish's pals, the catty Diane (Gina Smika), jealously tears into a luminous transfer student, Valerie Bates (the late Robin Stille), who declines Trish's gesture of atonement, deciding to spend her night babysitting her firebrand kid sister Courtney (Jennifer Meyers). But they are all uniformly ignorant of the news of a killer on the prowl, Russ Thorn (Michael Villella), who stalks the night hoping to put his depraved love into the chicks.

Around the halfway point of Thorn's massacre, the withdrawn Valerie switches on the TV to watch Hollywood Boulevard, the 1976 Allan Arkush/Joe Dante patchwork picture on which Amy Jones served as co-editor. The moment resembles an inversion of Laurie Strode's desperate pleas for rescue at the Doyle house from Halloween, with the damsel-in-distress here being one of the leery boys who crashes Trish's sisterly soiree. It ends with Thorn stabbing the kid to death out of Valerie's sight as Jones cross-cuts between that and clips from the televised film, thus sowing the seeds for Scream a good decade or so early.

But Jones' overall approach is less post-modern than Wes Craven's, which means that most of The Slumber Party Massacre is pro forma pandemonium, replete with an synthesizer-based suspense score akin to Rick Wakeman's soundtrack for The Burning and a handful of "Psyche!" scares not limited to suspicious-seeming hands over unsuspecting shoulders, characters feigning death for practical jokes and, lest you forgot, the classic "It's Only a Cat" standby. Not that there's anything necessarily wrong with such tactics, as they sometimes are followed by a traditionally grisly pay-off, but wasn't this supposed to be more clever than this? The deadening devotion to cheap tricks coupled with the rigid interchangeability of the film's starlets, all of whom given short shrift by a screenplay stuck between the poles of dry academia and dull convention, allow for instances of compromise to leap out of the shadows just as much as the villain does.

Villella, who gives the film's liveliest performance as the rape-minded slaughterer, bears a striking resemblance to Mal Arnold, a.k.a. the psychotic caterer Fuad Ramses from H.G. Lewis' Blood Feast, his motivations distinctly Mansonite ("I love you"). He also affects a peacock's body language as he pursues his victims, and the demented mannerisms of this Method-heavy performance are admittedly humorous. Top it off with the phallic nature of his murder weapon, which dangles down his groin with every intent of penetration (Brian De Palma was surely watching when he recycled this in 1984's Body Double), and you can sense the female empowerment manifesto teased at in the film's distinct pedigree.

The movie does have some particularly entertaining, borderline-camp ideas about female sexuality, from the giggly small talk of Trish's clique, the lingering close-ups of butts (step forward and turn around, Brinke Stevens!) to prepubescent Courtney's restless curiosity, which prompts her to raid Valerie's stash of Playgirl mags. At times, it gets hard to believe this wasn't written by a gay man. Still, The Slumber Party Massacre is a clearly Corman affair, a tried-and-true amalgam of bared and bored flesh which has its rewards (one of the gags involves the therapeutic ingestion of cold pizza crushed by a dead delivery boy because, hey, "life goes on") and is not too shabby for a 77-minute hunk of nostalgic ephemera. It's just a shame it's too leaden to truly embrace its playful side.

Deborah Brock, on the contrary, puts an even more outlandish spin on the original with her Slumber Party Massacre II, writing/directing a phantasmagoric quasi-musical which may as well be one of the guiltiest pleasures I've ever witnessed. In the spirit of Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night II and Sleepaway Camp II, tragedy gets reborn as dopey farce with the surviving Courtney (Crystal Bernard, of TV's Wings) still traumatized by her encounter with the Driller Killer as she experiences her own Birthday Girl sexual awakening. Hormones and horrors kick in simultaneously as her fantasies of hunky athlete Matt Arbicost (Patrick Lowe) are interrupted by eerie flashbacks (many of which, naturally, she wasn't there for), premonitions and regular visits from both her insitutionalized sister Val (Cindy Eilbacher) and a perverted Elvis impersonator (Atanas Ilitch) whose guitar, which resembles a Satanic trident, has a functioning drill bit where the neck should be.

Courtney herself carries a six-string given that she is in a girl band with her best buds Amy (Kimberly MacArthur, 1982 Playboy calendar girl), Sheila (Juliette Cummins, from Friday the 13th V and Psycho III) and Sally (Heidi Kozak, from Friday VII and Society). The quartet arrange a festive weekend away at the condo owned by Sheila's dad, but Courtney's mental state continues to worsen until finally she and Matt are alone and the temptation to "go all the way" brings out the Driller Killer from her subconscious.

Despite not salvaging the original's squandered theme of sisterhood under pressure (once the kangaroo meat hits the grinder, its practically every woman and man for themselves), Brock's central characters have a greater sense of camaraderie at the start. Even better, the roles at played earnestly and with a measure of natural charm by the four ladies. Bernard makes for a fetching, sympathetic lead star, whilst Cummins has waaay more fun as the requisite exhibitionist than her previous credits allowed. Kozak gets the wildest acne-based gross-out gag in history, and even if Sally's songwriting prowess is hardly on the level of the solid power pop on loan from Wednesday Week (whose "If Only" and "Why" are mimed rather adorably), Kozak is bubbly cute, as is MacArthur. There is a more casual sense of sexuality (read: swimsuits), too, that makes up for the noted lack of T&A.

And then there's Atanas Ilitch, a real life Detroit Rock City underdog who cackles and preens his way into slasher film infamy, a homicidal goofball who fires off quotes classic rock song titles with deranged gusto ("I can't get no...satisfaction!") and even turns a routine murder into a sock hop ("Let's Buzz!"). Not even Pamela Springsteen's reconfiguring of Angela Baker as a cheery psycho-Puritan can compete with Ilitch, a nutty send-up of John Travolta's Greaser image. Call that description a stretch, if you must, but he's the most talented, charming Fred Krueger clone of them all.

You know what they say, "Trixters are for kids."

Brock's screenplay and direction are the right kind of unpretentious, although the ending is pretty much a doozy in what is already a succession of moments worth inducting in the WTF? Hall of Fame. What's better is that she's taken the original's fanatical insistence on love-as-rape and comes up with some jubilantly dark comedy in Ilitch‘s presence (listen to him sing "I can't stop loving you, I won‘t stop until I do" as he chases after Courtney and Amy in a construction site). Some of the visual effects are dodgy, especially the fiery conclusion, yet Slumber Party Massacre II produces a couple of nasty prosthetic delights and boasts more ingenious production design and camerawork for its low budget than the original. Forget about the film's curmudgeonly one-star reputation; this is certainly the most hummable, quotable and repeatable entry in the series.

If the first film had all the nudity and the sequel all the fun, Slumber Party Massacre III, made under Corman's bottom-scraping New Concorde banner, has all the unpleasantry. It's a blunt retread of the original that literalizes the maniac's impotence and his reliance on the power drill as substitute for his limp manhood. The very first drill kill in this one involves a young woman cornered in her car, with her hands bound behind the headrest and the murder thrusting his drill pornographically. Once again, we have a female director looking for her break in Sally Mattison, as well as an intellectually-gifted writer in Harvard grad Catherine Cyran, but watching this queasy-making, assembly-line gorefest only makes me pine for the minor subtleties of Jones and Brown's original.

What else is there to say about the plot? Much like the recent Texas Chainsaw Massacres, it's plug-and-play-and-slay stuff in which a gaggle of close-bonded girls try to enjoy a night of revelry, are interrupted by their boy toys and end up falling prey to a vicious killer. The few cosmetic differences include: hostess Jackie Cassidy (Keely Christian) is selling her childhood home and the party is kind of a long goodbye; there is a hapless dork named Duncan (David Greenlee) filling the woobie position, who trades places with the pizza delivery girl (Marta Kober from Friday II) to assert himself into the party; two red herrings are on hand to provide devious glares; and there is a back story for the psycho involving Uncle Touchy, also a recently suicidal retired cop.

The character roster is overstuffed with uninteresting characters, as there are now seven spunky girls and five horny guys in attendance. Mattison has trouble managing her cast of twelve, and after duly isolating a couple off for a quick bumping off, there are at least seven survivors by the time panic ensues. This is about 30 minutes until the end of the film, which means the last act is a protracted, tedious chase sequence where some will conveniently stand off to the side whilst one of their ranks is assaulted. The villain will continually have objects broken over his head to slow him down, and even takes a bucket of bleach to the face, but the girls continue to stand around like idiots. And this is even when poor Maria (Maria Ford as one of the two characters who doff their tops) desperately tries to reason with and console the killer to delay her inevitable death. You start to miss the proactive courage of Trish Devereaux and the Bates sisters something fierce.

I don't get how anyone could say this is an improvement over SPM II. At least the women in that had personality and pep and were distinguishable by virtue of their musical hobby. They were so appealing, I myself fantasized about crashing their party. The chicks in this film seem utterly directionless and ditzy. It gets so dire that one character (played by Hope Marie Carlton, the fantasy girl in the waterbed from Nightmare on Elm Street 4) leaps through a glass pane out of defiance and commits suicide. I guess that's supposed to be funny, but the cynicism and brutishness prevalent throughout the rest of the movie just made this particular viewer want to say "Lucky lady. Give me Atanas Ilitch or give me death of Preppy Terminator already!"

Slumber Party Massacre III doesn't quite know the drill as much as either of the previous films and just ends up coming across as straight-up boring. That pun-heavy sentence both sums up my final thoughts about this flick as well as provides the one chuckle the film failed to give me. The poster is art is also amusing, in that none of the models who pose for it bear any resemblance to the film's stars, including the likes of Ford and Carlton. If Roger Corman doesn't care, why should I?

With only the original being planned for a BD upgrade, all three films can be found in Shout! Factory's The Slumber Party Massacre Collection DVD set, which in the company's proud tradition goes the extra mile in supplemental material. Each of the film's have their own full-length commentary track, moderated by diehard fan Tony Brown (webmaster over at the Old Hockstatter Place), and twenty-minute retrospective piece which recounts the experiences of working for the notoriously thrifty Corman, the juiciest anecdotes going to Deborah Brock and producer Don Daniel of SPM II. The mogul himself is missing, but the stories told do a good job of making you feel like he's monitoring your living room, too. Amy Holden Jones and Sally Mattison provide frank remembrances of their own, and we also get to hear from the likes of cast members Michael Villella, Debra Deliso, Brinke Stevens, Heidi Kozak, Juliette Cummins, Jennifer Rhodes, Brandi Burkett, Hope Marie Carlton, and Yan Birch. Also included are original red-band trailers and photo galleries corresponding to each entry.

Percy Jackson & The Olympians: The Lightning Thief/Sea of Monsters

PERCY JACKSON & THE OLYMPIANS: THE LIGHTNING THIEF
(PG, Twentieth Century Fox, 118 mins., release date: February 12, 2010; SRP: $19.99)

PERCY JACKSON: SEA OF MONSTERS
(PG, Twentieth Century Fox, 106 mins., release date: August 7, 2013; SRP: $39.99)


Take your mind back to 2010, the year film adaptations of young adult novel franchises were in full swing. J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter already rang the box-office bell five previous times and the grand finale was given the Kill Bill treatment with The Deathly Hollows, Part One arriving in late autumn. Stephanie Meyer's Twilight was on its third entry, Eclipse, and the first in Suzanne Collins' The Hunger Games series was in embryonic pre-production after Lions Gate secured the movie rights.

Lost in the shuffle was Percy Jackson & The Olympians: The Lightning Thief, based on Rick Riordan's own teen-oriented bestseller, relegated to the typically faithless dumping grounds of early 2010 by Twentieth Century Fox. This scheduling was a sign of avoiding competition with the teen lit titans, all boy wizards and bohunk monsters, as well as the final product being inescapably seen as a transparent clone of the inaugural Harry Potter films, most blatantly deduced from the employment of journeyman Chris Columbus as the director, someone who has embraced his hired gun status to the point where his production company is even named 1492 Productions. It's not like anyone was expecting a brave new world as far as Percy Jackson was concerned.

Bespectacled British yobs with wands were traded in for sullen Manhattan boys with swords, whilst Hogwarts and Quidditch morphed into Camp Half-Blood and junior cadet games of Capture the Flag. Instead of Ron Weasley, Riordan's best friend figure was a black teenage satyr/sensei/servant named Grover, which was more of a hard personality change than the rather traditional appearance of a feisty female warrior, Annabeth, a clear understudy for Hermione. The characters may have adopted physical deformities familiar to its Greek mythological trappings, as Dumbledore in this universe was Chiron, a centaur split between human and horse at the torso, but critics and audiences knew exactly where this film's true inspiration lied.

17-year-old Percy Jackson (Logan Lerman) is introduced as oblivious to this strange co-existence between gods and men, and only when Zeus (Sean Bean) accuses brother Poseidon's (Kevin McKidd) demigod son of burgling his lightning rod staff (why, there's the magic wand!) does Percy gradually realize his secret identity. For Percy is indeed Poseidon's progeny from a love affair with a mortal woman named Sally (Catherine Keener), and on a field trip to the museum overseen by wheelchair-bound Professor Brunner (Pierce Brosnan), a gargoyle posing as a substitute teacher attacks Percy in private, inquiring about the missing bolt. Brunner and "junior protector" Grover (Brandon T. Jackson) intervene, whisking Percy and Sally away to the Half-Blood campgrounds. Alas, Sally is forbidden to enter being a pureblood and all and is kidnapped by a Minotaur minion of Hades (Steve Coogan).

Afflicted with dyslexia and ADHD which are revealed to be talents rather than stigmas, Percy is confronted with the rumor of his treachery and vows to rescue his mom and set things straight with the holy trinity of Olympians. However, time is of the essence as Zeus has threatened war on the eve of the summer solstice, which means catastrophic natural disasters shall engulf Earth in flames. Percy defies Chiron's orders and ventures out to locate the Underworld where his mom is imprisoned, with Grover the goat-boy and Athena's steely daughter Annabeth (Alexandra Daddario) tagging along. Guided by a map handed down by the Luke (Jake Abel), the cocky absentee son of Hermes, Percy and friends travel cross country from Jersey to Nashville to Las Vegas collecting teleportation pearls to save them and all of mankind from premature damnation.

Chris Columbus, former screenwriter for Steven Spielberg (Gremlins, The Goonies) and protégé of John Hughes (Adventures in Babysitting, Home Alone), is quite a populist filmmaker at heart. I try not to level accusations of pandering at him, because I've seen worse hired gun filmmakers in my time and he at least knows how to make a film which is genuinely charming for all audiences. I grew up watching Home Alone almost on a Mobius-style loop and Mrs. Doubtfire remains a fun little diversion to this day. I even tout 1991's Only the Lonely as proof that Columbus was a generous actor's director on par with Hughes, who also helped prove John Candy was a multi-faceted, undervalued presence with Planes, Trains and Automobiles. But in the new millennium, I can't help but feel Columbus has calcified into a joyless groove, especially given that his previous film prior to The Lightning Thief was I Love You, Beth Cooper, a forced, unfunny attempt at recapturing the glories of both his and the late Hughes' pasts.

Having begun the 2000s with Harry Potter & The Sorcerer's Stone as well as The Chamber of Secrets, the 2010 arrival of Percy Jackson & The Olympians: The Lightning Thief feels like an Oracle's sad prophecy come to life, as Columbus' workmanlike reputation comes full circle to drag him down into uncut mediocrity. Columbus' slavish, Johnny La Rue-style devotion to crane shots, the minimal-stakes melodrama and his astounding lack of visual humor can be felt with all the finesse of a blow from Thor's hammer. Whatever touches he once demonstrated with ensemble casts has become an every-actor-for-himself Survivor Series where a lot of talented people get taken down for the count. Moments of striking spectacle which incorporate some effectively seamless CGI (I especially enjoyed a ferry ride down the boulevard of broken dreams) are taken to loud, repetitive dead zones which are as immersing as trying to dunk a cookie in a lab dish full of milk.

And then there's the matter of Craig Titley's screenplay, who apparently has invoked a powerful deity I never read about in all of my Homeric high school days: Diangellus, the God of Exposition. Whenever a mortal man has no faith in the sanctity of mise-en-scène, he seemingly prays to mighty Diangellus for a thudding line of over-explanation, thereby robbing any incident of magic, wit or intelligence. It makes the film seem more like a professor's waffling lecture than a majestic feat of storytelling, as everything has to be elaborated on with stern, mood-killing bluntness. Percy's newfound destiny is given to reams of tiresome specifics without any true feel for discovery or introspection, whereas revelations like the trio realizing the rat-infested garden shop is really Medusa's lair require a lot of thudding, literal exclamations that clutter and grate.

The name of that death trap is "Auntie Em's Garden Emporium," by the way, a backfiring allusion which reinforces just how much this makes The Wizard of Oz feel even more like The Odyssey by comparison. The stifling blandness of the central heroic threesome is enough to make you want to click your heels thrice and long for home. Logan Lerman may have the face of Disney-period Kurt Russell and the coiffure of Zac Efron, but Percy Jackson comes across more like a Luke Skywalker figurine with such a colorless, angst-ridden arc to burden. Ditto Alexandra Daddario, who has the piercing blue eyes of a junior Meg Foster but little worthy motivation behind them. Brandon T. Jackson has to play deadly straight the stereotypes satirized in Tropic Thunder, thus his incessant jive-talking and nervous subservience have all the gallantry of Chris Tucker.

Columbus overcompensates with a top-flight supporting cast who put their money where their cheeks are. Uma Thurman's bitter, bitchy Medusa ("I used to date your daddy!" she righteously sneers at Percy) could evoke dreaded memories of Emma Peel and Poison Ivy, but she clearly relishes the job and gives it a seductively sinister glee. Pierce Brosnan's grizzled but still velvety charisma adds true nobility to the dialogue (well, most of it, although even he makes his obligatory "horse's ass" quip induce a strange smile) as much as Thurman conjures up alluring bile. But the real fun is to be had when the trio encounter Hades' Hollywood hideout, with a saucy Steve Coogan in arena rocker leather chaps and the smoldering Rosario Dawson (the Mimi of Columbus' Rent) as his reluctant bride Persephone, a trophy wife more voluptuously desperate than any of the fictional housewives on Wisteria Lane. One would love to see a black comedy spin-off starring these two mismatched myths.

The Lightning Thief, though, seems content to climb the peak of Mount Obvious, resigned to its Potter-by-numbers fate which effectively squanders the potential for a bankable franchise. Even the soundtrack lays it on thick, with ridiculous deployment of AC/DC when Luke mentions the "Highway to Hell" and a Vegas interlude at the Lotus Hotel & Casino pumping up "A Little Less Conversation" and "Poker Face" as the youths partake of a certain flower-shaped cookie which dutifully distracts them from their mission, given their inconsistent knowledge of Greek lore. Unfortunately, their obliviousness is shared by Columbus and Titley, who have no new tacks with the fantasy adventure material passed on by Riordan, who probably deserves better than to be aligned with the Potter plagiarisms. His Percy Jackson is reduced to a Half-Blood Fool.

1492 words later, and now here we are talking about the streamlined Percy Jackson: Sea of Monsters, a late-blooming sequel which jumps straight ahead to a foreign director, the amusingly-named Thor Freudenthal, and brings in Green Lantern scribe Marc Guggenheim to adapt the second of Riordan's five volumes. The Prisoner of Azkaban this ain't, with Percy Jackson still unresolved in his daddy issues and having regressed in his confidence and fighting skills. The three principal stars return fairly more seasoned, with Lerman having wowed in The Perks of Being a Wallflower and Daddario opting for the C-list scream queen route thanks to Texas Chainsaw 3-D. Brandon T. Jackson, meanwhile, is stewarded out of the picture quickly despite being written less gratingly than before, the better to make room for a few new trekkers in Percy's latest quest.

First is Clarisse (Leven Rambin), daughter of Ares and doppelganger for Katniss Everdeen. It's she whose stamina and arrogance puts her at the top of the Camp Half-Blood student body, as the newly-introduced camp owner Dionysus (Stanley Tucci with an amusing drinking problem; Chiron appears recast with Anthony Stewart Head) appoints her to head an expedition to locate the Golden Fleece, which is the only cure for the sickly memorial tree, erected by her father Zeus after she has fallen, that is the source of the camp's protective force field. But the culprit, once again being the blandly malevolent Luke, outs himself to Percy and drives the conflicted hero into further rebellious action alongside Grover, Annabeth and a one-eyed half-brother named Tyson (Douglas Smith).

Tyson essentially serves the bumbling sidekick role the MIA Grover did in the original, but with Chris Columbus receding into a production credit, Freudenthal's overall approach is more (non-union German?) Spielberg equivalent than even Columbus could claim. The film is like a less frenetic version of The Goonies, replete with intrigue on an abandoned, ancient ship (with Confederate zombies instead of pirates), but also cribs liberally from Jaws (the Charybdis is mistaken initially for a swarm of shark fins) and Raiders of the Lost Ark, especially in the finale involving a golden chest Luke uses to re-animate Kronos, the dreaded Titan who ate his own godly children but was foiled by the three Olympian brothers. Like the first film, the movie's set pieces involve some cute variation on a classic Greek figure, such as when The Grey Sisters appear as reckless, sassy taxi drivers (played by TV comediennes Missi Pyle, Mary Birdsong and Yvette Nicole Brown) who spill the beans about a numerical prophecy which concerns Percy. Also, in one of the minor nods to the star-powered stunt-casting from before, Luke's papa Hermes finally turns up, but less as Joe Pantoliano's boorish stepfather from the original and more in the form of a UPS clerk played by the dashing Nathan Fillion, the Canadian Bruce Campbell himself, thus making the resentful Luke seem more like the dull brat he really is when the former Captain Mal drolly steals his one big scene.

There is a way to make teenaged conflict work on a dramatic level which also incorporates time-honored folklore, but between both Percy Jackson movies, lackluster screenplays and badly-calculated direction are the main curses which prevent them from scaling such heights. Watching the prejudiced Annabeth belittle and berate the adolescent Tyson, who looks like the son of Encino Man, in such a shallow, unpleasant manner feels like a gross misjudgment, and when Grover finally reappears as the maid for gigantic cyclops Polyphemus (boomingly voiced by Ron "Hellboy" Perlman!), it's back to the old shuck-and-jive. Even Percy Jackson himself doesn't appear to get a fully-satisfying reaffirmation, a further shame considering Lerman is capable of greatness. Even more than the first film, whose fractured familial bonds were at least consistent with Columbus' not-so-auteur stature, this is dramatically stunted and as clockwork as the Colchis bull who charges the camp at the beginning. The movie brings Percy back to square one out of sheer laziness and the beats are all too familiar.

Say what you will about the Harry Potter, Twilight or Hunger Games film series, but at least they each created their own respective worlds and populated them with convincing analogues for their types of fan, allowing people to lose themselves in the stories. With the Percy Jackson duo, there is a crushing sense of impersonality and dreary obligation which goes against any types of vicarious thrill one could ascertain. At least Thor Freudenthal is a marked improvement over Chris Columbus, especially in regards to staging his action scenes and creating more indelible images. Such moments of marvel as Percy and friends riding a candy-colored Hippocampus as well as getting sucked into the Bermuda Triangle crackle with joy and tension, but ultimately the Diary of a Wimpy Kid director is fitted for the same strait-jacket as the over-qualified Lerman.

Percy Jackson: Sea of Monsters feels direct-to-DVD caliber through and through, which will definitely not be enticing if there is a third installment. Too much time has passed between the first and second, and the cast are clearly getting too old for their parts. Much like Columbus and Hughes' own Home Alone series, don't be shocked if you find the second sequel recast and ushered out to an even more minute degree of fanfare. The gods are not that crazy, after all.

Enchantéd, Part VII: TerrorVision

Enchantéd: A Retrospective Tribute to Diane Franklin

VII. TerrorVision (1986)

(R, Empire Pictures)

Charles Band, more so than Golan/Globus or Dino De Laurentiis, was responsible for producing a great deal of my adolescence. It was through his 1980s distribution company Empire Pictures and subsequent Full Moon Features that I was inundated with pretty much all the cheesy bliss my heart could ever stand. Of course there were the Puppet Master and Trancers series, plus certified classics such as Re-Animator and...err, Ghoulies. That latter movie's poster art was the perfect distillation of Band's entrepreneurial ability to con you in with a memorable image and tag line. Have an ugly green monster emerge from the potty and slap on the tag line "They'll get you in the end," and the low-hanging fruit of such was the siren call of schlock cinema. It may have been funnier than anything in the movie it promoted (intentionally so), but it helped produce a surprise theatrical hit that kept the Empire banner afloat for a while.

And Full Moon was also one of the best video companies in the early 1990s by virtue of Band's engaging promotional newsletter called "VideoZone," which mixed behind-the-scenes footage and trailers and merchandise plugs to give us perhaps the earliest and most significant form of special feature on tape. Of course, DVDs now have enough room to offer closer, crisper approximations of the theatrical experience and hours worth of paraphernalia, but renting a film like Demonic Toys or Arcade or Bad Channels at least offered a little more than your average feature presentation.

Besides, Band's legacy has yielded a glorious trickle-down effect. Without Troll, Claudio Fragasso would have been forced to name his Z-movie cornerstone simply "Goblins." Without Trancers and Dollman, Tim Thomerson would have never established himself an unlikely action hero. Without Re-Animator and From Beyond, Stuart Gordon and Jeffrey Combs would've been remembered as irreverent theatre vets instead of true gifts for the bookish B-movie buff. And without TerrorVision, chances are I'd have forgotten completely about Diane Franklin, writing her off as a one-flick wonder to my endless dismay.

TerrorVision, writer/director (and occasional editor) Ted Nicolaou's 1986 feature debut from Band's Empire days before helming the Subspecies series for Full Moon (as well as Bad Channels), arrived at the starting gate with yet another indelible image predetermined at Band's will, that of a monstrous eye staring from within a satellite dish as its tentacles (as in te-NT-acles) reached out to an entire suburb. And aside from a top-billed Diane Franklin, fresh off her shamefully ignored star turn in Better Off Dead..., the rest of the cast was a cult cinema fantasy league drafting in Gerrit Graham, Mary Woronov, Jonathan Gries, Bert Remsen, and Alejandro Rey. With those names and that one-sheet, TerrorVision was bound to become an underground transmission of immense proportions.

Yet Nicolaou and his movie experienced multiple static frequencies from a shoestring marketing budget, the lack of a massive wide release and non-stop negative reviews. Even Joe Bob Briggs' reaction upon its release was lukewarm at best. Both of the video movie guides I owned as a boy awarded TerrorVision with their lowest possible grades, be they a turkey or a "Woof!" Naturally, the only outlet for which it could deserve any defense was on home video, and sure enough the Lightning Video cassette was unavoidable on horror shelves out where I lived. And it was a lucky thing they printed the credits right at the bottom of the box, the better for me to catch a glance at the first name on the starring roster and realize it was Monique herself.

Even luckier to me was the discovery that Diane Franklin was permitted to go to Camp.

Looking back at the movies in the series thus far, both The Last American Virgin and Amityville II: The Possession don't completely qualify as campy fun particularly because of their crudely-committed solemnity. These are bitter movies at their core, calculated exploitation endeavors whose promise as empty, exaggerated diversions are weighed down by taboo subject matter, earnestly mimicking the affectations of Afterschool Special-level melodramas with no intended absurdity (the incestuous shenanigans of Amityville II, in particular, are unfeasible but still incredibly icky). They don't go for broke in the manner of a Mommie Dearest, where the hurtful reality of child abuse is glossed over by Faye Dunaway's diva/devil ferocity and the dialogue takes even the slightest, most innocuous trigger (bearing walls, rose gardens and, of course, wire hangers) as an excuse to take off from the runway of sanity. Second Time Lucky and Better Off Dead..., by contrast, take more gonzo chances with their characters and locales than either Virgin or Amityville. And honestly, Diane seems a lot more uninhibited as a performer, by extension also completely delightful to watch, in the movies made from Summer Girl to TerrorVision.

What I'm trying to say is that I feel that the best gauge of a performer's charisma and intelligence isn't so much emotional breakdowns as it is inhabiting a larger-than-life version of a human being. Michael Shannon, for instance, did a giddy job as crooked detective Bobby Monday in David Koepp's courier chase flick Premium Rush. There was an energy and determination and humor to that role which is admirable to take in whether you chose to watch it actively or not. John Waters, of course, has been consistent in regards to directing name stars like Johnny Depp, Kathleen Turner and Johnny Knoxville to their fullest potential as character actors. And Diane's co-stars Gerrit Graham and Mary Woronov have each built reputations for themselves in the realm of camp, if titles such as Phantom of the Paradise, Used Cars, Rock ‘n' Roll High School, and Eating Raoul stick in your memory.

That's where Suzy Putterman comes in, the truest symbol of 1980s spunk by virtue of her cosmic embellishment. With her rainbow-colored weaves, Dale Bozzio eye shadow, Encino accent, and Madonna/Cyndi Lauper fashion sense, Suzy is beautifully tacky pop art made flesh. Go visit the Cinema Gonzo web site if you doubt just how Warholian little Suzy truly is. In the TerrorVision chapter of her autobiography, Diane Franklin talks about how she gravitated towards comedy as a means of expression beyond the ingénue image she was saddled with throughout her career. She makes the same point in the special features on Shout! Factory's release of the film, but by the end of the 1980s, the Princess Joanna role in Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure arguably put her back in that box just in time for Diane to develop a bankable name for herself. That she endured as a cult star doesn't feel so much directly tied into her blue-eyed, birth-marked sex appeal as much as it demonstrates she had a chameleonic propensity and accompanying range the industry never really could fulfill.

Diane holds her own against the bug-eyed Gerrit Graham and the rubber-lipped Mary Woronov as the most flamboyant members of the Putterman clan, the straightest straw being drawn by eleven-year-old Chad Allen as Sherman, although even he's polluted by the weirdness surrounding him. Sherman is a pint-sized Lane Meyer in this case, the only one who catches wise to the chaos, endures continued screams of disbelief and is forced to hold his own against the self-centered instincts of his elders. And father Stanley (Graham) is the one who obliviously begets the televised invasion of the plot, as a beam of energy containing an exiled Hungry Beast from planet Pluton is picked up by Stanley's brand new Do-It-Yourself 100 satellite dish. Ostensibly over his head in trying to install the device, Stanley is even more klutzy in regards to his primary reason for buying the damned thing: to put the final touches on his high-tech Pleasure Palace and become the hippest swinger in town.

Mary Woronov portrays the inverse of Mrs. Bland here as the pushy Raquel Putterman, whose forays into hedonism aren't purely materialistic but just as misguided. Her and Stanley answer a classified ad and pick up a couple of eccentric Los Angelenos, glad-handing Grecian Spiro (Alejandro Rey) and shrill-voiced actress Cherry (Randi Brooks), whose kinks intimidate and embarrass them. Stanley is worked into a libidinous frenzy at the sight of Cherry in her Gordian-knotted string bikini, whereas Raquel learns that Spiro is way too faithful to his boy-loving heritage, a definite turn-off for the Spartan, straight-laced Puttermans.

Suzy, meanwhile, is out on a date with her new boyfriend, the heavy metal bozo O.D. (Jonathan Gries), and Sherman is left home alone for a spell under the watchful, wacky care of his grandpa (Bert Remsen, who had a bit part in Jeff Lieberman's equally cross-pollinating Remote Control), a survivalist nutter who advocates lizard tails as a resourceful form of junk food. The boys stay up all night to ogle chesty creature feature hostess Medusa (Jennifer Richards) until the Hungry Beast materializes and devours/mutates first with Gramps and then later with Stanley and company, leading to a bizarre moment which bridges the gap between John Carpenter's The Thing and Brian Yuzna's Society. Suzy and O.D. return to taunt the hysterical Sherman until they come face to face with the monster, who proves docile at the sight of O.D.'s studded leather armbands, thus easing him into an E.T.-style crash course in the wonders of music and television. 

Thus, they have successfully trained the world's first extraterrestrial couch potato. Oh, but for how long?

Perhaps that's the funniest joke in the entire film, the notion that the already doofy-looking beastie is as much of a TV junkie as the MTV-obsessed lovebirds and the status-seeking parents. Like Sherman and Grampa, the Hungry Beast is distracted by the sight of Medusa and her science fiction marathon showcasing such 1950s ephemera as Robot Monster and Earth Vs. the Flying Saucers, grunting giddily as the alien threat of the latter lays waste to national landmarks. As designed by Empire stableman John Carl Buechler, the Hungry Beast is a mountainous turd of a terror replete with a third eye attached to a stray limb and a lethal pincer that reduces hapless victims into gooey green puddles to be lapped up by a mile-long tongue. Revealed to be a common pet on its home planet, the Hungry Beast is like man's best friend if said owner happened to be Seth Brundle.

Fittingly, TerrorVision suggests a telepod experiment which merges nuclear-family sitcoms, Ed Wood, an entire VH1 special's worth of Eighties signifiers, and the aforementioned Spielberg blockbuster into one lumpy sum. It's also one of the many Charlie Band flicks released in 1986 where the production migrated to Rome, resulting in a distinctly Italian mise en scène similar to From Beyond or Crawlspace. Cinematographer Romano Albani had already twice collaborated with Dario Argento (see: Inferno and Phenomena) before lensing TerrorVision and Buechler's own Troll concurrently. And production designer Giovanni Natalucci, who worked on all of Band's foreign affairs, doubled up here as art director. The idiosyncratic color schemes and set decorations they devise end up pushing TerrorVision further into surrealism, especially the pornographic artwork and erotic sculptures which consume the entire Putterman household.

As for how Ted Nicolaou's script capitalizes on all this lurid excess, let's just consider TerrorVision a film at the crossroads where Dada meets dum-dum. The plot is 1950s kitsch in a hyper-modernized setting where narcissistic characters grouse about the most minor of inconveniences, lean too much on pop culture in their personalities and are mannered to the point where you expect a laugh track to chime in at any second. Mary Woronov is introduced wearing aerobic Spandex (similar to her villainous appearance on the season finale of Sledge Hammer!) and nagging about the bad reception getting in the way of her regimen. Jonathan Gries as O.D. makes Bill & Ted and Wayne & Garth look like savants by virtue of his dopey, dim-witted swagger. Gerrit Graham and Alejandro Rey strip down to their briefs and quirk up their every line of dialogue, from the way in which Stanley pronounces "Jacuzzi" to sound like "j'accuse" to Spiro's Italian waiter patois. Suzy foolishly decides to become the monster's "business manager," blissfully unaware how the rules of King Kong could apply to this very scenario. Rather than something you'd normally see on Adult Swim, Frank Zappa's juvenile approach to satire is the norm here, very much an acquired taste (Mr. Mother of Invention himself was considered as a composer before the job inevitably went to Richard Band).

Nicolaou's approach is perhaps more polarizing than Boaz Davidson or Savage Steve Holland, primarily because it is so committed to going far out and far gone from anything resembling a familiar universe. That's very much the film's greatest charm or an insufferable hindrance depending on your perspective. Even Killer Klowns from Outer Space allowed the alien threat to feel genuinely threatening and produced a couple of frightening, grisly set pieces. TerrorVision is pure goofball abandon, extremely self-conscious about its genetic tackiness and Me-Decade trappings to the point where even the horror elements do not feel legitimate, especially given that every character appears made from straw and slime. Although categorized as "horrror," TerrorVision plays wholly as comedy, and in a just world, TerrorVision and Killer Klowns from Outer Space would've swapped places at the Video Update I remember renting both those tapes from.

I also bring up Killer Klowns because in the spirit of that film's loopy musical assistance from punk rockers The Dickies, TerrorVision boasts a catchy theme song of its own as written/performed by The Fibonaccis. Singer Magie Song chirps, chants and croons through a senseless array of lurking horrors and gloomy lust in the lyrics, which at least mentions Medusa in the pre-chorus. Still, damned if I could locate swarms of insects anywhere in the film proper. It's more dreamlike compared to the direct awesomeness of "Killer Klowns."

TerrorVision is the epitome of the kind of movie one would see on the monitors of a trendy nightclub or hipster house party, a visually deafening experience that is equally loud in terms of concept and performances. It's equally right at home in the living room of any 13-year-old boy crazy enough to give it a temporary pardon from the VHS shop. It's a bizarre hydra of elements that are equally over-the-top and under-ambitious, squeaking by on its spirit rather than by story or smarts. One would be better off embracing the same year's The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 as a merciless, dark comic send-up of big business, sexual mores and dysfunctional families, although the New Wave-riding pastel paradise which is TerrorVision does have a worthy "the more things change..." attitude. It's an iridescent display of intellectual decay, but at the end of the day, I simply can't resist Diane Franklin puckering her lips as she bops along to W.A.S.P. 

I'll take the last train out of Squidsville, fer sure, like, totally!

TerrorVision shares space with 1987's zombie-themed The Video Dead on Shout! Factory's combo pack double feature release, but both films are given bonus commentaries and featurettes to satiate the whims of each film's audience. Of course, after seeing and hearing Diane on the Second Time Lucky DVD, I gravitated towards the former. She joins Ted Nicolaou and Jon Gries for a yak-track that is sprightly and contains plenty of amusing production specifics and quirks such as Gries' industry connections stemming back to the sci-fi films of the 1950s, namely King Dinosaur, not to mention the familiar-looking shape which the remains of his O.D. form upon disintegration. It's equally amusing to see the trio on-camera for "Monsters on Demand," which incorporates more of the cast (Chad Allen, Mary Woronov) and crew (the brothers Band, John Carl Buechler) for a cohesive summation of the film's inception and reputation. When you hear the remarkably perky Diane proclaim her "No way!" reaction to some fans' recollection of the flick as well as her quoting of certain Suzy-isms, it's hard to think that a potentially debuting Belinda Carlisle could hold a candle to the actress. Meanwhile, Woronov provides a good word for the absent Gerrit Graham and Allen recalls walking around the risqué set in the company of his Italian Catholic parents. There is a still gallery to round things out, but surprisingly missing is the theatrical trailer. 

The things we do for love...

Kick-Ass 2

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Evilspeak

EVILSPEAK
(Unrated, The Moreno Company, 97 mins., theatrical release date: February 26, 1982)

Satan worship and the underdog story, two great tastes that go together... Wait, that was how I started out my last review, which was of Warlock, a movie good enough to deserve the Reese's-referencing intro. Good God, I need to keep working on my Diane Franklin tribute or else I'll never get the peanut butter girl out of my system. I should be talking TerrorVision...what movie is this, again?

Ooh, boy, I'm watching Evilspeak! Or, as I like to call it, "The Computer Wore Devil's Horns." This is the 1981 movie in which Gentle Ben's playmate concocts the world's deadliest virus to get back at the noxiously sadistic students and staffers who abuse him at every turn. It's based on a story by Stephen King...er, Joseph Garofalo, but what's so familiar about watching a bullied kid pushed into a corner where his or her only salvation is the supernaturally-assisted homicide of his many tormentors? Besides, the main character's name is Stanley, and the movie proper isn't eponymous as opposed to those many genre divas with names like Carrie or Jennifer or Ruby.

Like many a young actor, the incomparable Clint Howard had a small window of time around the dawn of the eighties where he was in his early twenties and could pass himself off as high school characters. So after playing Eaglebauer, the bathroom stall entrepreneur of Allan Arkush's Rock ‘n' Roll High School, he was cast as a teenager in Eric Weston's Evilspeak, specifically an orphaned outcast named Stanley Coopersmith. A puppy-faced charity case enrolled at West Andover Military Academy, the odds are clearly stacked against Stanley's sad psyche from the start. The alpha male clique led by Bubba (Don Stark, Donna's daddy from That ‘70s Show) is tempted to sabotage the weak Coopersmith's pleas for affirmative action on the soccer field by the coach himself. Not even the sympathetic black friend Kowalski (Haywood "Dwayne" Nelson) proves to be much of a buffer. The brutish headmaster Colonel Kincaid (Charles Tyner) berates and paddles whatever discipline he can into Stanley, and the kid's detention duties are to clean up the chapel's dingy basement under the supervision of an alcoholic pederast named Sarge (old reliable R.G. Armstrong).

Is it any wonder that Stanley gravitates toward the tutelage of the ancient occultist Lorenzo Esteban (Richard "Bull" Moll!), an excommunicated Spanish monk who once deduced that "Satan is God" but whose portrait still graces the church walls?! Stanley uses his computer to translate the Latin passages of Esteban's journal, but soon his wicked spirit has been manifested fully into the mainframe (Windows Update can bite me). Stanley tries to perform his own Black Mass ceremonies, but is oblivious to the flashing screen demanding he procure a human sacrifice. Circumstances beyond his control turn out to be in Stanley's favor: first the Sarge has his neck snapped by the possessed PC, and then Colonel Kincaid's frumpy/foxy secretary, Miss Friedemeyer (Lynn Hancock), who confiscated the book with the sole purpose of prying the Pentagram off its front cover, is attacked in the shower by bloodthirsty boars. The tome conveniently teleports itself back to its rightful owner.

Bubba's goon squad inevitably go past the breaking point in their traumatizing of Stanley ("Arf arf..."), and on the eve of the big homecoming game, "Cooperdick" finally succeeds in raising Hell. Except for that gonzo 10-minute stretch of Reckoning Day retaliation, where our levitating loser takes delight in decapitating the Colonel with a broadsword, those evil pigs make an encore and the whole church bursts into a glorious inferno, Evilspeak is just as programmatic and dimwitted as you'd anticipate.

What‘s most damning about Evilspeak is that it's just so boringly base until its wad-shooting finale. Despite a checkered cast of TV icons and character actors which also includes Claude Earl Jones as the passive aggressive coach, Lenny "Luca Brasi" Montana as the merciful chef and Joe Cortese as the Reverend Jameson, there is too much misery for the sake of misery. Much like Jennifer and definitely unlike Carrie, the bullies in this film are charisma vacuums built for maximum contempt, cruel ciphers whose bile-inducing detestability is clearly meant to push the viewer over to Stanley's (and by extension the Devil's) side. There's something potentially mischievous about this blatant manipulation, especially when Jameson's pious sermon built around a sports analogy cross-cuts with Stanley on the verge of his breakthrough/breakdown. But co-writer and director Eric Weston has staged the earlier proceedings way too po-faced and drearily for it to make much difference. If Brian De Palma is fiendishly campy, Eric Weston is flat corny, the single worst attitude an exploitation filmmaker can exhibit.

It takes a leaden touch to make the shameless synergy of cheesecake and sausage factories that is Miss Friedemeyer's bare-naked demise by carnivorous hogs complete and utter tedium. You can claim in defense that Weston's devotion to establishing Stanley's hopeless plight be taken as slow-burn, but the moments of straight schlock such as this stop the film cold and only add to the sense of cynicism. All of the characterizations are purely one-note, even the Methodically gangly Clint Howard in the first lead role of his kooky career, so much so that your defenses actually strengthen rather than crumble.

Like My Bodyguard as re-written by Anton LaVey, only much less compelling, Evilspeak did manage to court some controversy when it was classified as a Video Nasty in England thanks to an uncut print distributed on tape without ratings board certification. In America, the film was clumsily censored so it would pass with an MPAA-approved R, never to be seen in any kind of restored form until Anchor Bay issued a composite print on DVD in 2004. The finale itself is rather cheesy as far as FX work goes, with the many slashed heads resembling stuffed fruit or pointy sculptures, but at least Weston finally delivers those long-awaited thrills. The eeriest image involves a Christ figure's wrist pulsing to life, the embedded nail loosing itself to fire directly into Reverend Jameson's forehead. Also worthwhile are some effectively ominous computer graphics and subterranean set design. And Clint Howard gives a painfully earnest performance, the best this film has to offer, which makes up for in conviction what it lacks in plausibility.

However, that Anchor Bay disc is out of print, so the home video rights moved over to Code Red Entertainment, a company sadly known at this point for becoming a money pit. If you really want to experience Evilspeak, hold off until Shout! Factory issues it on Blu-Ray in the spring of 2014. At least an eighth of the movie will definitely be worth the wait.

Warlock (1989)

WARLOCK (1989)
(R, New World Pictures/Trimark Pictures, 103 mins., theatrical release date: January 11, 1991)

Time travel and Satan worship, two great tastes that go together in Warlock, one of the last New World Pictures productions which got a belated theatrical release two years after its completion. The former Corman house, several years after going public and branching out into video and television (thank them for Alan Spencer's cop comedy Sledge Hammer!), were in financial ruin after failed acquisitions and court cases deprived them of any gains they stood to earn from such successes as Soul Man or the Hellraiser series. Like Cannon Films, the dissolution of New World was a messy one, although unlike Golan/Globus, New World went out with a bang when they acquired Michael Lehmann's seminal teen comedy Heathers. They also had Warlock, but it was shelved until early 1991 when another independent company, Trimark Pictures, properly unleashed it to the world at large.

Producer/director Steve Miner had done two movies for the company in 1986 with the aforementioned Soul Man and the previously reviewed House, but here was perhaps the best of the three, a black magic take-off on the premises of Nicholas Meyer's Time After Time (1979) and James Cameron's The Terminator (1984) which shifted from Salem to SoCal as the forces of good and evil waged ancient war in modern times. Part of the reason Warlock worked so well was the casting of the primary combatants, two rising British talents in the form of Julian Sands and Richard E. Grant. Sands was already familiar thanks to notable parts in The Killing Fields, Gothic and the Mechant/Ivory drama A Room with a View, whereas Grant had made his debut in the cult classic Withnail and I. This was a considerable boon, as they play admirably straight characters who would've tempted a more winking treatment had they been instead filled by established superstars.

Sands and Grant admirably resist the allure of parody, playing cool and consistently their respective parts as the nameless Warlock and witchfinder Giles Redferne. The film opens during the supernatural scare in Massachusetts circa 1691, as the Warlock has been successfully captured and incarcerated for heresy by the dogged Redferne. On the eve of the prisoner's execution by funeral pyre (with cats for kindling, natch), the Devil throws a curve by whisking the Warlock away through a time-vortex twister, although Redferne catches wise and jumps in after him. Their destination is three centuries later in Los Angeles, where first the Warlock and then Redferne happen upon Kassandra (Lori Singer), a twenty-something Valley Girl waitress with diabetes who rents a room with the openly gay Chas (Kevin O'Brien).

No sooner have the two taken in the stray sorcerer than our villain literally plants the kiss of death on hapless Chas, eventually making his way to a dubious spiritualist played by the great Mary Woronov, an old guard from the New World (Death Race 2000, Rock 'n' Roll High School). She channels the spirit of the Devil against her will, informing the Warlock of his mission: to retrieve the scattered pages of the Grand Grimoire, the coveted anti-Bible which contains the true name of God which, when spoken backwards, can beget the apocalypse. Intrigued by the notion of becoming "the new messiah" (watch the theatrical trailer, where the line is taken from an unused alternate death which apparently also involved demonic eyes pasted over the psychic's nipples), the Warlock sets about collecting the various sheets starting at Kassandra's house, after she has already been introduced to and called the cops on Redferne.

The vain Kassandra is cursed to age twenty years per day thanks to his machinations, and has no choice but to bail out Redferne for help. The two reluctantly travel cross-country in an attempt to catch up with the witch, who has already murdered an Arizonan preteen (Brandon Call, the boy sidekick to Rutger Hauer from Blind Fury) of impure soul so that his fat can be harvested for flying potions and hidden in the basement of a Mennonite farm out in Colorado close to completing his task. The final pieces of the puzzle will take them back to the hallowed grounds of Boston, but can Redferne finish the job when his archenemy is more hellbent than ever before?

Figuratively speaking as an eighties B-movie enthusiast, Warlock is very much a witches' brew of a movie. Miner and screenwriter David "D.T." Twohy (co-creator of the Vin Diesel Riddick series) have all the proper ingredients to fit the recipe, especially when you factor the cast by itself: lips of Sands, larynx of Grant, legs of Lori, eyes of Mary (and yes, that's voice actor Rob "Yakko Warner" Paulsen in a walk-on role as a gas station clerk). Miner doesn't quite stir the pot with the kind of cackling vigor of a Witch Hazel, but instead relies upon the leisurely dry humor evident in all of his prior horror efforts. Case in point: the ironic cut from a severed tongue sizzling in a pan to Kassandra serving an omelet at her place of work, a joke which frankly would've gotten the point across without a cop immediately making the connection via interrogation. After the bottom-line bloodbaths of the Jason films and the broad farce of House, Miner is refreshingly droll with the basic tone of Warlock.

Twohy's script allows for Middle English and Malibu personalities to contrast against each other with aplomb. While Redferne sets up his witch compass in his first sudden, uninvited appearance at Kassie's ("Now, brute, one last time we play the game out"), she phones the emergency police line ("He's got a thing for blood...draw your own conclusions") with no intention of waiting for them to show up ("I'm skatin' right now!"). Redferne demands her to stay until the cops arrive, at which point he matches whips with tasers and is suitably outmatched. Kassandra is bewitched and fools herself that she can pass for 40 with a tennis skirt and a new dye job on her hair. The script has plenty of requisite references that show just how far out of time the ancient duo has come (The Wizard of Oz, faucets instead of wells), but this doesn't act as the movie's only source of comedy.

The visual effects are of a particularly rough quality, dependent on wires and bright orange opticals whenever the Warlock flies or lets loose with magic. Luckily for Miner, he doesn't lean too much on either, which is fine since he got some natural magic out of two proper actors in Julian Sands and Richard E. Grant. One of the more delightful tricks involves Kassandra nailing the Warlock's tracks as a means of crippling him, and Sands' agonizing screams get the point across with gusto. It should be said that Sands, here suggesting the heir to Malcolm McDowell's charismatic creepiness, makes a top-flight antagonist by virtue of his smolderingly Aryan good looks, wicked smirk and verbose grandiosity.

Although Sands returned for the first sequel in 1993, the hammier Anthony Hickox-directed Warlock: The Armageddon, missing from that film was an opposite number of Grant's caliber, a personality every bit as wry and wonderful as Sands was initially. Grant as the blue-eyed, fur-lined, God-fearing Redferne has an equally likely commanding presence and knack for character-specific subtleties that is truly dignified. Lori Singer's part is a bit less distinctive than that of the male leads, but she has a spacey comic timing and manages a solid job of her own.

Linger too long on Warlock and its ridiculousness becomes transparent, especially in the bizarre sight of Lori Singer in shoddy old-age facial make-up trying to limp about as a 60-year-old in her glittering leather miniskirt. The rubbery Richard Moll zombie from House looked more convincing. The true delight of Miner's film is in the way he and Twohy spin such a breezily entertaining chase pic out of superstitious sundries, from the painted-on hex mark outside the Mennonite barn attic to the various threats and colloquialisms dropped by the main characters. You've got to love how Redferne warns a priest of the imminent danger of the Warlock reversing all of God's designs into something akin to "Satan's black, Hell-besmeared farting hole," whereas that same man of cloth is later threatened by the witch to aid him lest his "children be born slugs of cold flesh."

In a word: Huzzah!

Warlock remains available on DVD in the American market specifically in a full-frame, bare bones release. A special edition would be a preference, especially considering how Jerry Goldsmith's colorful, ominous original score would benefit greatly from an isolated music track. Also, a crisp widescreen print mastered in HD would undo my murky VHS memories and bring new life to the film's rich scenery and production/costume designs. There are Blu-Ray releases from certain European territories, but this is something British distributors Arrow Video would do wise to explore for one of their own catalog titles. Chances are Lionsgate Home Entertainment in the U.S. won't be getting around to this one until the world ends. Must be the Devil, I don't know.

The To Do List

THE TO DO LIST
(R, CBS Films, 104 mins., theatrical release date: July 26, 2013)


Brandy Klark is the keynote speaker for the graduating class of 1993 at Merriwether High in Boise, Idaho. Captain of the Mathletes, record-holder of the establishment's highest GPA and able to balance both the school newsletter and her own feminist zine ("Womyn"), Brandy boasts an intellectual sense of accomplishment, but, as her peers are quick to point out, she is flunking out in terms of carnal knowledge. To put it bluntly, she's a virgin! That almost changes when she reluctantly attends a keg party where she gets the hots for blonde hunk Rusty Waters (Scott Porter), who's jamming an acoustic Def Leppard cover to a flock of hotties. A mistaken booty call is picked up by the inebriated Brandy, but she nervously outs herself as "valedictorian" and Rusty flees. What's a hormonally late-blooming girl to do?

Although originally titled "The Hand Job," The To Do List doesn't stop at that particular gesture, as Brandy outlines her new sex education curriculum by writing an inventory of every trick she can find. But her obliviousness to the rules of motorboating, teabagging ("Must be British") and rim jobs (it's not in the Encyclopedia Brittanica, so she makes a mental note to ask the librarian) is the most subtle reminder of the pre-Google period of pornographic sophistication. Self-biographer Maggie Carey, making her feature debut, stuffs era-specific signifiers into every nook and cranny of the dialogue, costumes, settings and song selection. If you ever wielded a Trapper Keeper, hiked up your denim skorts and squealed at the prospect of watching Beaches on VHS (the distinction made clear in case you assumed anyone in this film could afford Laserdiscs), then you'll be on this like Humpy Hump to a bowl of lumpy oatmeal. If you just groaned at that analogy, you'll long for the subtlety of Greg Mottola's Adventureland very early on.

Brandy consults her experienced best friends Fiona (Alia Shawkat) and Wendy (Sarah Steele), as well as her abrasive big sister Amber (former O.C. babe Rachel Bilson, uncharacteristically uproarious), for guidance/pressure as she randomly fulfills her fuck-it list. The only person initially willing to experiment with her is the unfortunately-named Cameron Mitchell (Johnny Simmons), the reluctantly platonic friend who doesn't realize his role as mere guinea pig and confuses Brandy's advances as romantic interest until she stands him up on a date and he conveniently discovers her records. Brandy's not too distressed as she's got a bigger fish to hook, namely Rusty, whom she decides will be just the right person to deflower her once there's nothing more to learn.

The premise is prototypical early 1980s child's play, but this time, the focus is on a single strong-willed heroine instead of a group of boorish mates. More vexing are some meandering concessions to the summer camp formula through Brandy's temp job as a lifeguard for the local public pool/daycare center, where she's humiliated to no end by her crude boss Willy (Bill Hader), although the worst incident involves a floating brown log which she assumes to be a Caddyshack-style goof until she actually tastes the truth for herself. Did I mention Willy has a rivalry with the elite country club vandals? This is bad Meatballs sequel territory which has no bearing on the plot or even a worthy pay-off.

Speaking of which, our Bill Murray in this case is Aubrey Plaza, not merely a decade too old for the part but also too confined to her sardonically defensive persona as cultivated on TV's Parks and Recreation. It's hard to shake the feeling that this could've been a spin-off movie for April Ludgate with only a few quick re-writes. This only worsens the character flaws of Brandy Clark, a studious, self-centered automaton rarely allowed the sliver of a genuine conscience or spontaneous vibrancy. A gutsier move would've been casting either Sarah Steele or perennial second-banana Alia Shawkat, routinely denied the vehicle she truly deserves in the wake of not just Arrested Development but also Drew Barrymore's undervalued Whip It, as the blossoming bookworm. Either of them could have made Brandy affecting, whereas Carey and Plaza jointly render her facetious.

Plaza, to her credit, gives off a few glimmers of expressive subtlety and is reliably game when it comes to the many seed-spilling scenarios thrown her way. As a sketch-comedy veteran consigned to a vignette-centric narrative, Carey calls upon the talents of several big name comic performers who liven up the episodic succession of semen and lube gags. Alas, for every sublime showcase for someone like the invaluable Bill Hader, who often reaches for a chuckle yet knows when to sincerely drop his guard unlike Plaza, or the giddy Andy Samberg as the vainglorious, spacey grunge rock singer whom Brandy goes oral for, there's a squandered appearance by Christopher Mintz-Plasse as the weaselly best friend or Donald Glover as the straightforward token minority conquest. Too much of The To Do List feels ancillary and aimlessly vulgar, not to mention anachronistic in the many blatant similarities to American Pie (chiefly in form of Brandy's oppositional caregivers played by Connie Britton and Clark Gregg). This formless familiarity undercuts the easygoing sense of gender-reversed generosity Carey wrote into the story.

Remember those frank, funny conversations Stacy and Linda had in Fast Times at Ridgemont High, or even the asides between Vicky and Jessica from American Pie? Carey captures the spirit of those scenes in the many zippy exchanges between Brandi, Fiona and Wendy, who are enlightened by magazine articles about the nifty benefits of pineapple juice and the solidarity found in Bette Midler sing-a-longs. And it ends zestfully with a long-overdue orgasmic climax that supports the girlish inhibitions coded throughout the film. The males in the film are properly mocked for their conservatism, and the moral is treated with both a bratty indifference and a bold defiance. Contrary to what Brandy's dad believes, it's best to leave some doors, even the ones in the back, open since that is how the light gets in.

Carey earnestly aims for a John Hughes-style youth caper which takes account of sexual "edge" of such forebears as Porky's or The Last American Virgin. Truth of the matter is that the majority of those pre-Sixteen Candles films were too easily distracted, morally bankrupt and downright sexist to make their growing pains resonate. Hughes' sense of ambiguity, surrealism and empathy set a standard which not only helped legitimize the teen flick in the 1980s, it planted a giving tree for future generations to harvest. His broad strokes seemed organic rather than contrived, the fantasy elements came with a premium (there's no denying that The Breakfast Club would be back in their separate food groups come Monday) and when he directed Molly Ringwald and Ally Sheedy, the actresses didn't come across as mannered or self-conscious. Carey is closer to the exploitative aesthetic rather than the emotional, which does a disservice to both her revitalizing perspective and her stunted, stunt-casted leading lady. It also makes The To Do List a way more apt title in hindsight than "The Hand Job."