Slashers and Splatterpunks

by David Byron

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  genius of the first Psycho, but this is one sequel that ranks up there with its predecessor! The story, written by Tom Holland ( Fright Night and Child"s Play), is seamless and really pulls the viewer in. There is no hokey-jokiness that ruins most sequels – Psycho II is straight-up suspense and takes itself seriously. There aren‘t any plot holes, it stays true to the original and Holland does an excellent job of keeping you guessing and even surprising you in the end! This is probably one of the most solid and loyal-to-the-original sequels I have ever seen in the horror genre!

  The acting is also fantastic. Perkins returns as Bates and again makes us equally pity and resent him. We see him more in this film than we did in Psycho and really get a feel for his ―unbalanced‖ personality (even when he is supposedly ―cured‖). Meg Tilly is wonderful as Mary, who‘s hiding her own true self. It was also a great pleasure to see Vera Miles in the role of Lila again. There are also several familiar faces that pop up throughout the film (Dennis Franz, anyone?!).

  The atmosphere of the Bates‘ big house is decidedly creepy, and the filmmakers use that to the utmost advantage. I especially like the homage of the shower/peephole scene as well as the set up of Norman‘s mother‘s old room. Director Richard Franklin does a tremendous job and creates some dramatic shots Hitchcock himself would be proud of.

  The killings themselves are subtle affairs (except for that butcher knife through the mouth or the shovel over the head bits), but work marvelously with the mysterious atmosphere.

  I had always avoided the Psycho sequels because I figured they would be grossly sub-par (and even offensive) to the original, but I have to admit that Psycho II greatly impressed me. If you enjoyed Psycho, you will most likely enjoy its sequel because it honors the original with its spectacular performances, loyal, believable and impressive script and direction all the while keeping you on the edge of your seat.

  Slashers & Splatterpunks

  A Nightmare On Elm Street / 1984

  Slashers & Splatterpunks

  A Nightmare On Elm Street / 1984

  Directed by Wes Craven

  Cast: Johnny Depp, Heather Langenkamp, Robert Englund, John Saxon, Amanda Wyss

  *** The worst thing you can do before viewing Wes Craven‘s A Nightmare on Elm Street is to watch one of its sequels. It isn‘t that watching the sequel first spoils the chronological flow of the story. No. It is merely because the sequels are predominately ridiculous trash. This can color your preconceptions of the original movie which is, in fact, rather good. For A Nightmare on Elm Street is, believe it or not, a horror film. It is (brace yourselves) scary. Unlike the pseudo-scary, pseudo-comic franchise that grew out of it, the original film contains some memorable images, interesting plot twists and (gasp, faint) even a decent-to-good script.

  For those who have spent the past few decades sitting facing the wall with their fingers in their ears, A Nightmare on Elm Street concerns a group of teens who discover that they have all experienced nightmares concerning a scarred gentleman with a redand-green jumper and razorblade claws. When one of their number is violently killed in her sleep by an invisible attacker, PMT-driven adolescent Nancy (Heather Langenkamp) sets out to discover the truth. Yet it‘s hard to avoid a killer who strikes in your dreams, and soon a mixture of sleep-deprivation and over-protective parents (‗it‘ll all be fine if you‘ll just get some sleep‘), begins to take its toll. A tense race ensues between Nancy and the killer. She must discover his identity and how to destroy him before sleep takes her

  – for with sleep, comes death.

  Visually, A Nightmare on Elm Street is surprisingly interesting. Like so many films of this genre, its artistic ingenuity is concentrated into several gory set-pieces. Yet they appear to hover somewhere between creepy, gothic, supernatural imagery and mad 80s cartoon violence. Particularly effective is a scene featuring a bath which momentarily becomes fathomless when our killer, Freddy Kreuger, drags its occupier under the water. Fans of Evil Dead-style, gory physical effects will also be delighted by the scene in which blood gushes, fountainlike, from a bed which has just ‗eaten‘ a young Johnny Depp (this was his first film role, which would make

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  Nightmare an interesting collector‘s piece even if it were as awful as its sequels). The movie score is patchier. While some of the nursery-rhyme sections are excellent (‗one, two, Freddy‘s coming for you, three, four, better lock your door‘), a housemate of mine did point out – not inaptly – that when the characters ran the friction of their feet created bad 80s rock music.

  The script is rather better. In this film, Freddy has not yet become the ridiculous wisecracker of the sequels (I will stop bashing those soon, honest). He says very little, and what he does say is all the more potent for its brevity. ‗Please, God!‘ whispers a doomed teen. Freddy waves his clawed hand menacingly and sneers, ‗THIS is God!‘. Robert Englund is excellent as Freddy, playing it by turns patiently relentless and out-and-out murderously bonkers, and the sound of those razor-clawed gloves scraping against metal is enough to give anyone the shivers. The teen cast is less impressive, with Langenkamp being the only one giving it her all. Even Depp turns in a so-so performance. Yet none of this stops the film from being enjoyable.

  A Nightmare on Elm Street is smarter than your average teen horror movie. A little banal and silly in places, it nevertheless has some quite subtle scares to offer, as well as a feast of striking visuals. I‘d advise anyone who has been discouraged from seeing this film to bite the bullet and watch it. If nothing else, it‘s cheap ‗n‘ cheerful horror entertainment for those rainy nights in (cheap, because it turns up regularly in second-hand shops, at least in the US, where I‘m based). And, like that high school polio vaccination, it‘s really not as bad as you thought it would be.

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  Phantasm II

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  Universal Presents A Film Written And Directed By Don Coscarelli, And Produced By Robert A. Quezada. Photographed By Daryn Okada. Edited By Peter Teschner. Music By Fred Myrow. Running Time: 93 Minutes. Classified:R .

  *** At the very beginning, which is kind of like a prologue to the actual movie, we are introduced to a woman named Elizabeth (Paula Irving). A blond, seemingly smart late teen who tells about visions that she has had for the past 8 years. Her visions are of a boy named Mike (James LaGros), a man named Reggie (Reggie Banister) and the terrifying entity, The Tall Man (Angus Scrimm). She‘s not sure what the visions are about, but she must find answers to them.

  As Liz is talking about her visions, we pick up right where part 1 ended, with Mike in his room, being pulled through his mirror by the Tall Man. Now we see Reggie hear it from downstairs and immediately he gets up and runs to find what the commotion was. He sees Michael on the floor with the Tall Man and his demon dwarves surrounding him. After a small struggle, he gets himself and Michael out of the house (conveniently) just before it explodes.

  From there, Michael ends up in a psychiatric hospital for a few years where they tell him that everything that he went through was in his head. When Michael is finally released from the hospital he is 19 years old and certainly wasn‘t fool enough to believe it was all in his head. Michael heads straight to the cemetery to start digging up graves to prove they are empty and Reggie shows up still trying to convince Michael to let it go. After seeing several empty graves, Reggie is still on the defensive with Michael and the two of them head back to his house in time to see it explode, killing his family inside. Once the explosion happens, Reggie suddenly decides that Michael is right and they must try and stop the Tall Man at all costs. It won‘t be easy and could take years, they know, but they still must try.

  Going from town to town, they search in vain for the infernal Tall Man. While on their search, Reggie picks up a woman named Alchemy (Samantha Philips) that Michael is not too keen on because of the visions he‘s had of her lying dead in a morgue, but


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  they take her with them anyways. Meanwhile, Liz‘s grandfather dies and her grandmother goes missing. While out searching for her, she stumbles upon her grandfather‘s empty grave and decides to check out the nearby morgue for answers. After entering the morgue, Liz sees all kinds of strange things happening: a man bringing in an obviously exhumed casket that is covered in mud, she runs into a priest, Father Myers (Kenneth Tigar) who knows too much for his own good and even has an up close and personal meeting with one of the infamous spheres. After finally freeing herself from the madness in the morgue, she escapes right into the arms of the man she‘s had visions for years of, Michael. It makes for a Kodak moment.

  The happiness is short lived as Liz is kidnapped by the seemingly ever present Tall Man. Michael and Reggie see it happen and give chase back to the morgue once again, leaving Alchemy behind at the house. Liz is not going to be kept without a fight as she battles furiously with her captors. Michael and Reggie soon find their way in and the three of them have all sorts of problems in the form of the Tall Man‘s little scary dwarf demons that also return from the first movie. In the original film they always lurked in the shadows, and they still do here also, but we do get to see their faces this time around and lets just say these little boogers haven‘t been getting much beauty sleep. And to bring up the spheres once again, they too play a much more prominent role this time around and we also see that these things are much more versatile in their arsenal than the first movie showed.

  Eventually, there is a showdown of epic proportions with the Tall Man that ends in a slimy, gory mess and leaves us with a cliff hanger to carry onto part 3, which came six years later.

  Phantasm 2 was Don Coscarelli‘s return to the director‘s chair, armed with a much bigger budget than the first film due to him securing a deal with Universal Pictures. The effects are much more elaborate, gory and violent this time around with my favorite part being when one of the spheres burrows it‗s way through one of the Tall Man‘s cronies, lifting and contorting his body before finally finding it‗s way out of him…through his mouth. The sets are also all top notch and the look of the film is no doubt of a higher

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  budget. The movie employs a mostly stellar cast, but for reasons that I am not aware of, the original Michael from the first film, Michael Baldwin, does not return here and it is an obvious downer from the get-go. While James LaGros does a decent job as 19-year-old Michael, he still doesn‘t do as good of a job as Baldwin did. Thankfully, Coscarelli got Angus Scrimm and Reggie Banister to return to the fold and it does manage to make up for the missing Baldwin. And speaking of Angus Scrimm, in this movie he seems all the more menacing and creepy. Perhaps it‘s because he‘s 10 years older than in the original and his appearance is just more old and it makes him more scary? Whatever the reason, Scrimm is the man and with all of the recognition the man gets, it still isn‘t as good as it should be. He isn‘t quite on the same level as Mike, Fred, Jason and Leatherface, but he SHOULD be and this movie shows why.

  The same dreamlike atmosphere from the original is intact this time out; things are seen by one person and not another and dreams and reality seem to blend together at times. Coscarelli masterfully wrote the story to where it is hard to distinguish between what is real and what is fantasy, much like the original. Much of the story takes place in cemeteries, morgues, abandoned towns and deep, dark nights, all instilling an effective setting to the material at hand. The Tall Man and all of his demonic tools (spheres, demon midgets) are still never clearly explained, leaving it up to you to decide just what in fact they really are. For some, this is frustrating, but the mystic and mystery is what adds to the creepiness and overall effectiveness of this franchise. By not explaining everything and leaving some of the plot points in the unknown, Phantasm seems to be better for it. All that is certain here, is that when you die, you don‘t go the heaven, ―you come to us‖ as the Tall Man explains to Father Meyers at one point and you know that once that happens…your ass has had it!

  Better hope you don‘t die!

  Slashers & Splatterpunks

  Books Slashers & Splatterpunks

  Danse Macabre

  Slashers & Splatterpunks

  With my fascination with horror, and my love of books and writing, it's no wonder that one of my idols would be Stephen King. His writing is witty, creative, acerbic, and all sorts of other adjectives that can be categorized under the heading of GOOD. Those who follow his novels will tend to find he writes forewords and afterwords talking of his experiences with writing the novel in question, or what led to the idea - a very attractive attempt at getting in the head of the writer.

  Danse Macabre is Stephen King's chance at discussing his own experiences in the horror genre, be it movies, television, or books. Some of what he writes about are influences on his own writing; others are aimed at picking out some of the greats of the period between 1950 through 1980. Of course, all of the opinions expressed by King are tinged with his own unique sense of sarcasm and comedy, along with side-notes of autobiographical accounts from his own life.

  Despite the fact that this tome of King's favorites (or least favorites, depending on the subject matter) is outdated, it's still a great look at the genre for the years depicted. King has some fantastic picks for novels and films, many of which are more obscure than you might imagine. But what stands out more than King's list of top horror is what he has to say about them and how they've influenced his own writing. In fact, I found King's essays about his own life much more fascinating than his analyses of horror novels, which became quite fatiguing to read and seemed hypocritical to King's dislike of over-analyzing stories.

  Although King can venture off on tangents, he mostly sticks to the topic at hand. The majority of the time, he manages to wrap back around to what he was talking about before, but it's easy for the reader to get lost in King's allusions and topic shifts. The end of the novel gets a bit bogged down with all of King's critiques on horror, and at times, King can come off as a bit of a critic himself, name-dropping those who aren't up to par with what he considers good writing. Yet that seems to be mostly what Danse Macabre tries to accomplish: pick out the good stuff and let the rest fall away.

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  Pick up Danse Macabre as a jam-packed roadmap to all the horror you may have missed. Great for those who never lived the '50s through the '80s, and even better for those wanting to get into the genre. The best part, though, are King's essays on his past and how it intermingles with horror; call me a junkie, but I sure love to hear about what influences some of my favorite horror, just as King tries to do here in his dance.

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  Off Season

  Slashers & Splatterpunks

  Off Season is one of those books, for me at least, that‘s always been mentioned when discussion comes up about the best in literary horror. It‘s also a book that I‘ve never read thanks to its relative unavailability at a reasonable price. The good folks at Leisure Books have changed that, however, making this classic novel, like Red and The Girl Next Door before it, available for the first time as a mass market paperback in its author-approved original version.

  Upon reading it for the first time, I can see why the world just wasn‘t quite ready for what Ketchum wanted to tell them when the book first came into being. That explains why, despite promises of fame and fortune, Off Season came out with little to no fanfare, neutered to the point of absurdity. Thank the gods the world has changed and we can stroll into any Barnes and Nobles or Waldenbooks and read all the sick and twisted things Ketchum has to say about a murderous clan of inbreeds off the coast of main.

  When I started on Off Season I have to say I was a little taken aback. The first half of the book, which is lean and mean at just under 300 pages, is a lot of setup and character development, allowing the reader to get comfortable with the story‘s leads before the insanity that fills the second half rea
lly takes over.

  Said characters consist of Carla, a professional editor who‘s on a working holiday off the coast of Maine, a woman very focused on her career and determined to be successful at everything she does. She‘s invited her sister, Marjie, Marjie‘s boyfriend, Carla‘s boyfriend Jim, and her ex Nick along with his new girl up for the weekend to catch up on old times, have some sex and drinks, and enjoy the quiet. Unbeknownst to all of them, however, is that a few miles away, in a cave near the ocean, a very large family of monstrous humans live; filthy creatures who have de-evolved to utter savagery and cannibalism as a means for survival. Carla and her group seem like a Thanksgiving dinner to this twisted clan, and after studying them for a while to make sure they understand (as best they can) just how many there are, they attack.

  From that point on, Off Season becomes an unrelenting cavalcade of the most horrific acts you can imagine as the clan takes one of the characters from the outset and kills them in an incredibly vicious manner. Up to the actual point of this first death we‘re not sure just how far Ketchum is going to go with the violence and

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  savagery. Once we see just how horrific this clan truly is, all bets are off for the rest of the novel, and Ketchum does everything in his formidable storytelling skills to push the violence as far as is possible… and then goes just a bit further for good measure.

  It‘s really hard to believe that this story was written almost 30 years ago both because of the subject matter and the fact that it‘s taken this long to finally get out to the public at large in the form the author intended. That either shows that as a society we‘re more willing to accept fiction for what it is, or that we‘re so far gone that we just don‘t care. I‘d like to think it‘s the first.