The Horror of It All

by Adam Rockoff

  New Year’s Evil is the most professionally made, and by this I mean the least incompetent. Roz Kelly, who played Pinky Tuscadero, Fonzie’s main squeeze on Happy Days, is cast as Blaze, the on-camera host of a televised New Year’s Eve rock special. During the show, she’s terrorized by a caller who promises to murder one victim each time the clock strikes midnight in different time zones across the country. He identifies himself as “Eeevil” and uses an electronic device to make his voice sound like Stephen Hawking’s. If this actually seems like a cool premise, don’t worry, it’s not. The killer is revealed as Blaze’s ex-husband, who wears a sweat suit like a Russian mobster and hides his identity behind a Dick Nixon (I think) mask. The highlight of the entire film, aside from the end credits, is when the ex-husband tries to get into another character’s pants by telling her, “There’s a big party up at Erik Estrada’s place.”

  For being so irredeemably terrible, Home Sweet Home has a strangely compelling pedigree. It’s produced by and features Don Edmonds of Ilsa: She Wolf of the SS fame. Alex Rebar, star of The Incredible Melting Man, is the executive producer. A five- or six-year-old Vinessa Shaw, who went on to play the HIV-positive prostitute in Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut, is the young daughter. But the star of the whole shebang is Jake Steinfeld, creator of Hollywood’s Body by Jake fitness empire, as a drooling, homicidal, PCP-injecting, recently escaped mental patient. I’ve heard that Steinfeld has no sense of humor about his involvement with the film, which makes watching this travesty almost worthwhile.

  Just before, I said I didn’t know which of these three films was the worst. I was wrong. It has to be Don’t Go in the Woods, since I just rewatched it and can’t remember a single thing about the film other than some mountain man murders a bunch of hikers. I hate the fact that the sheriff in the movie is so morbidly obese it’s distracting. I hate the fact that the film is sometimes referred to as Don’t Go in the Woods . . . Alone! on poster art and home video for no reason whatsoever. I hate the actors, the script, the effects, and everything about it except for some nice travel shots of the Utah wilderness. But most of all, I hate it for simply existing. It’s the worst slasher film ever made. And not in a so-bad-it’s-good way. It just sucks. And at barely eighty minutes, it’s seventy-eight minutes too long.

  * * *

  Postscript: A few weeks before I turned in this manuscript, I was perusing one of my favorite books, Nightmare USA: The Untold Story of the Exploitation Independents, by Stephen Thrower. To my complete and utter surprise, as soon as I began reading the section on Don’t Go in the Woods, I remembered that Thrower had quite a bit of praise for the film he calls the “quintessential video nasty” (emphasis his). I had no choice. If an author who wrote twoIV of the most important works of horror criticism saw something so special about Don’t Go in the Woods, there had to be something I was missing. So I went back and watched the movie three fucking times: on YouTube, off my old VHS tape, and finally the twenty-fifth-anniversary edition DVD. Was there some longer, uncut version that I had never seen that would finally allow me to see the light? Turns out, there wasn’t—the film (all three versions) was as awful as I remembered. In fact, all this painfully long episode did was reinforce something I already knew—even the most brilliant writers are sometimes dead wrong.

  MOST ANNOYING CHARACTER—MALE

  Insert your own joke here. I mean, there’s a reason the audience cheers following a good 95 percent of the killings in slasher films. The Friday the 13th series alone has a murderers’ row of folks who can’t die soon enough. There’s Ted from Part 2, who “welcomes” his friends to Camp Crystal Lake by having their truck towed, and Part 3’s Shelly—also a contender for Character Least Likely to Get Laid—who unintentionally gives Jason his trademark hockey mask. And finally, good old Teddy Bear, Crispin Glover’s foil from The Final Chapter, who gets stoned, watches an eight-millimeter stag film, and then gets put out of his sexless misery with a knife to the back of his skull. But all are more lovable losers than anything else. For someone who really engenders loathing, who makes you want to crawl into the screen and throttle him, we have to return to Home Sweet Home.

  With this sentence—and certainly with the previous section on the worst slasher—I’ve undoubtedly written more about Home Sweet Home than it deserves. But we can’t hold that against “the Mistake.” You see, that’s what all the grown-ups call the teenage rocker son of one of the characters: the Mistake. As in, he was a “mistake.” They also spend the better part of the film musing about popping Valium and killing the kid. So it’s not really a surprise that the Mistake retaliates by spying on them while they have sex and taunting them with priceless lines like “Rock and roll forever!” and “Let’s get it on, baby!”

  I once described the black-and-white-face-painted Mistake as a “KISS wannabe,” but he’s obviously much closer to a squirrelly Marcel Marceau with diarrhea of the mouth. And although we can blame his behavior on his worthless parents, unfortunately, that doesn’t make him any more tolerable. When he finally ran into Jake Steinfeld, I was so grateful that this was the end of him, I went to the Body by Jake website and almost bought a Body Balance Air Pod for $29.99, a contraption that looks like it’s guaranteed to break your ankle.

  MOST ANNOYING CHARACTER—FEMALE

  Sleepaway Camp may have been passed over for Biggest WTF Moment, but it returns stronger than ever to claim this category for everybody’s favorite deranged aunt. Don’t worry, though, this is no consolation prize born of pity. We don’t have an Al Pacino Oscar situation on our hands. As most people will remember, Pacino was denied the statuette for The Godfather, Serpico, The Godfather: Part II, Dog Day Afternoon, . . . And Justice for All, and Scarface, until 1992, when he finally won Best Actor for Scent of a Woman, condemning him to a subsequent career of screaming guttural noises at the audience.

  No, Aunt Martha is more than deserving of this honor. When we first meet her, she’s about to send her son and niece, Angela, off to sleepaway camp. She’s dressed like a gay sailor and ponders rhetorical questions out loud, but we can almost excuse this bizarre behavior since, as the previous scene revealed, the saintly woman adopted Angela after her father and brother were killed in a tragic boating accident. But quickly Aunt Martha becomes more grating than Freddy’s nails on a chalkboard. Every word, every mannerism, reeks of purposeful overacting. But since there’s no context for any of it, we’re left scratching our heads. Watching her, I’m reminded of the audition scene from True Romance. In it, we have Michael Rapaport (a good actor), pretending to be Dick Ritchie (a bad actor), reading for the role of a good actor. I have no idea which one Aunt Martha really is—a good actor pretending to be bad, or a bad one trying to be good. I do know, however, that she has less than four minutes of screen time in the entire film and yet every second feels like an eternity.

  At the end of Sleepaway Camp, we learn that Aunt Martha is not only annoying but batshit crazy. In reality, she adopted her nephew after the accident; her niece was the one actually killed. However, because she always wanted a daughter, she raised “Angela” as a girl, turning the poor kid into some kind of gender-confused homicidal freak.

  I don’t know why I feel compelled to add this, but from the interviews I’ve read it seems like the actress who played Aunt Martha, Desiree Gould, is a lovely normal woman. She became a successful real estate agent and appeared in only a handful of additional films. I still have no idea if she’s a good actress, or why she made the creative choices she did, but it’s pretty clear she’s not the kind of person who, in real life, goes around psychologically castrating orphans.

  MOST MISUNDERSTOOD

  I loved April Fool’s Day the first time I saw it. It’s one of my favorite movies, period, and one of only four horror movie posters I have framed in my office (the others being Creepshow, I Spit on Your Grave, and The Watcher in the Woods). Unfortunately, few others seem to share this sentiment. Before writing any more, I feel obligated to give the mandatory spoiler alert. So if you�
�ve never seen the film twenty-nine years after its original release—but still plan to—please stop reading.

  The film starts off like a typical slasher film by way of Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None.V Muffy St. John, a wealthy college student, invites a group of her friends to spend the weekend on her family’s private island. After the requisite practical jokes, the cast is picked off one by one. The big twist, which comes with only a few minutes left in the film, reveals it all to be the ultimate April Fool’s prank. It turns out that Muffy is set to receive the estate as part of her inheritance, but only if she can prove that it can pay for itself. To do so, she plans to stage murder mystery weekends. This was a trial run and her friends were the unwitting guinea pigs.

  Ironically, it was the critics who seemed to appreciate the joke the most. While the reviews were hardly glowing, most acknowledged that April Fool’s Day was a cut above (my bad pun) its contemporaries, mainly slasher sequels, which were starting to be released with some regularity (the notable exception was Joel Rubinoff of the Toronto Star, who called the ending “so inept it could have been plucked from an old Laverne & Shirley episode”). Horror fans, on the other hand, hated the film (although it did make nearly $13 million). From what I can ascertain, they felt tricked (maybe the title should have given them a clue?), like when a particularly surreal episode of a TV series turns out to have been a dream. How this ruins the previous seventy-five minutes I don’t know, but audiences clearly felt it was all a big joke that they weren’t in on. That’s too bad, because if you just sit back and enjoy the ride, then April Fool’s Day is a lot of fun.

  You have director Fred (When a Stranger Calls) Walton, who obviously knows a thing or two about suspense, expertly pulling the strings; one of the all-time best final girls in Amy Steel; Thomas F. Wilson, fresh off of Back to the Future; the always interesting Clayton Rohner; and Deborah Goodrich, the hot chick from Just One of the Guys. The real scam was that she bamboozled the twelve-year-old me into believing that all college girls were into casual sex and S & M. April Fool’s indeed.

  MOST RIDICULOUS TRIGGER

  Look, I’m not trying to justify murder. But sometimes, I feel that the killers in slasher films get a raw deal. I mean, what if you were a harmless geek and the popular kids stuck your head in the toilet, yanked off your underwear, and burned off half your face with acid (Slaughter High)? Upon recovering, you probably wouldn’t run right to the principal. Or what if you saw your sister die (Prom Night), your father murdered (My Bloody Valentine), or your poor young son sink to his watery grave because his camp counselors were making love (Friday the 13th)? You’d probably be pretty pissed off. Pissed off enough to pick up a convenient weapon and mete out some good old-fashioned vigilante justice.

  In Christmas Evil, little Harry experiences nothing as traumatic. He sneaks downstairs to find his father, dressed as Santa Claus, sniffing his mother’s crotch. Seriously. These two are either the most chaste couple I have ever seen or far too kinky for me to comprehend. The kids are asleep and they’re finally alone—and this is the way they choose to work off their holiday stress. Mommy stands in front of the tree while Santa-suit-clad Daddy kneels in front of her, massaging her thigh and . . . smelling. Eventually, little Harry grows up, but instead of this oedipal episode leaving him with a distinct distaste for Christmas, it only exacerbates an obsessive love of the holiday. So of course, he takes it upon himself to spy on the neighborhood boys and girls and mark down which have been naughty and which have been nice. Oh, and he also murders those people who don’t share in his seasonal glee.

  The adult Harry is played by actor Brandon Maggart, father of singer Fiona Apple. Back in the nineties, Apple had a huge hit with the single “Criminal.” The opening line is “I’ve been a bad bad girl.” Every time I heard that fucking song—and I heard it a lot, since they played it everywhere—I would imagine Papa Maggart adding his daughter’s name to his list. Since Fiona had been very naughty, for her sake, I hope life didn’t imitate art.

  MOST INFLUENTIAL (PRE-BLACK CHRISTMAS)

  It’s often referred to as the first true “body count” film. It’s also referred to as A Bay of Blood, Blood Bath, Carnage, Chain Reaction, and Ecology of a Crime—and this is to say nothing of its many non-English titles. I call it Twitch of the Death Nerve, both because that’s the title under which I first saw the film and because it’s my favorite of all the nonsensical appellations.

  With Twitch, Mario Bava unknowingly created the template for the dozens of eighties slasher films that can trace their lineage back up to this bloody bay. The plot is a whodunit about a group of contemptuous individuals who are trying to lay claim to a prime slice of bayside real estate. Most people find this one of Bava’s most linear films, but I have to confess that most of the time I have no idea what the hell is going on. Maybe it’s because some of the characters look remarkably alike and I have trouble telling them apart. But no matter, it’s not the plot but Twitch’s unique combination of ultraviolence and jet-black humor, not to mention the surreal ending, that makes it so delicious. I am, however, convinced that Bava was getting paid per use of his zoom lens. For some reason, the Italians as a whole have always unabashedly embraced this stylistic gimmick, but Twitch takes unnecessary zooming to absurd extremes.

  Over the years, as Twitch became more accessible on home video, a minor controversy erupted over the similarity between certain scenes and those in Friday the 13th Part 2. And when I say “minor controversy” I’m being generous. It’s the kind of thing only horror obsessives give a shit about. Like the unending and heated debate over the proper way to refer to the group formerly known as the Quarrymen—is it “The Beatles” or “the Beatles”? Never has the proper case of a “T” been more relevant. But as inconsequential as this seems to normal people, fans were convinced that Friday the 13th Part 2 stole from Twitch.

  Sean Cunningham denied having ever seen Twitch. So did Steve Miner, the director of Friday the 13th Part 2, as did Part 2’s writer, Ron Kurz. Fans were not satisfied. The similarities were too pronounced. You can almost explain away a machete to the face, as you can the death of a character in a wheelchair. But the famous “shish kebob” scene—in which a pair of lovers are impaled on a spear while in the throes of ecstasy—is literally identical. Leave it to author Peter Bracke to get to the bottom of things. In Crystal Lake Memories, Kurz reminisces about collaborating closely on Part 2’s script with Phil Scuderi, whom he describes as “a cross between Roger Corman and Michael Corleone.” He gives Scuderi credit for coming up with the aforementioned scenes, including the human shish kebob. Why does this matter? Because as the shadowy investor behind not only Friday the 13th but Last House on the Left, Scuderi also ran Hallmark Releasing. And what was an early film that Hallmark distributed? You guessed it, Twitch of the Death Nerve, which Scuderi actually retitled Last House on the Left 2! Self-righteous fans consider this outright theft. But I don’t know, I think it’s kind of cool that an American sleaze merchant could plumb the depths of Italian exploitation and appropriate the tropes in a Hollywood blockbuster.

  MOST SEQUEL-WORTHY KILLER

  In many ways, The Burning is the quintessential slasher film. Aside from the fact that the “final girl” is a boy, it stays as close to the slasher paradigm—by this time, fairly well defined—as any film in the subgenre: a tragic accident disfigures an innocent character who in turn becomes a homicidal maniac and seeks his revenge, on both the responsible parties and anyone else who gets in his way.

  However, in many other ways, The Burning is just plain weird. It’s best known today as the first original production from the Weinstein brothers; Harvey Weinstein takes the unusual (in fact, it’s the first time I’ve ever seen it) credit of “Created and Produced By,” laying the groundwork for an entire career of fearlessly promoting himself as the driving creative force behind a project. Then there’s the score from Rick Wakeman, the keyboardist from Yes, which gives the film a distinct giallo-like feel, especially in
the early scenes before we arrive at camp. Tom Savini turned down Friday the 13th Part 2 in order to work on The Burning and his effects are without a doubt the highlight of the film. But unlike any of the Friday the 13ths, which sliced and diced many counselors but drew the line at prepubescent campers, The Burning has no such compunction. The kids are brutally murdered in broad daylight; poor Fisher Stevens even has his fingers snipped off.

  Therefore, it’s really a crying shame that good old Cropsy lasted only a single film. As anybody who ever attended overnight camp knows, every place has its own local legend; even my childhood day camp had Zacharia, who, from what I remember, had one mangled eye, which, of course, made him evil. Upstate New York, where the Weinsteins were from and where The Burning was shot, was home to Cropsy. The legend was so pervasive that it was also the basis for Madman, another slasher in production at the exact same time. However, once the Madman team got wind of the rival production, they called an audible, tweaked the script, and renamed their villain Madman Marz.

  Obviously, I’m cheating a little bit in nominating Cropsy as a perfect candidate for jump-starting the never-happened Burning franchise. After all, Michael, Jason, and Freddy are all vaguely supernatural beings, which allowed audiences to suspend their disbelief and welcome them back for each subsequent sequel. But Cropsy was just a crotchety old caretaker who was burned to a crisp. And at the end of The Burning, there’s no question that a well-placed ax to the face prior to a second immolation polishes him off for good. Still, if the film had done a little better at the box office, and the Weinsteins didn’t have such an art house hankering, I like to think there might have been a way to bring the melted madman and his trusty garden shears back for an encore.