31 Horrors: Student Bodies (#16)

Wherein I attempt to watch 31 horror films over the course of October. 31 horror films that I have never seen before, from obscure to acclaimed classics. We'll see how well I go in actually finding the time to watch and then write about them in some way.

Student Bodies, a very early (the first?) entry in the dubious subgenre of horror spoofs begins with successive establishing shots labelled Halloween night, Friday the 13th, and then Jamie Lee Curtis' birthday. I kinda knew I was going to like this 1981 horror spoof from right then. If the rest of this brief 86-minute film from 1981 don't quite live up to the hilarious opening ten minutes, then that's hardly surprising. Throwing so many jokes at the audience in rapid succession, I'd be willing to bed that this is some of the hardest I've laughed in, well, ever. My flatmate can attest to that. I was in hysterics. It's the old "I was laughing so hard I missed the jokes" story and boy is it relevant with Student Bodies.

An obvious precursor to Scary Movie - there are even jokes from this film that the Wayans brothers appear to have copied nearly 20 years later, which is saying something - Student Bodies came on the heels of the Zucker, Abraham, Zucker masterpiece, Flying High (or Airplane if you're not Australian). It's easy to see the inspiration and while the ratio of jokes that work to those that don't is obviously higher (people remember Flying High for a reason, although I'd say Student Bodies should at least have a fond reputation amongst the horror community), it works spectacularly well more often than not. 86 minutes is, apparently, too long - especially during the elongated prom investigation scenes towards the end that act as little more than reasons for characters to do jokes that the writers couldn't shoehorn in elsewhere - but, if nothing else, the opening thirty minutes allow for enough good will for that to not matter quite as much.

Most curious of all is that the film appears to spoof horror movies that hadn't even been invented yet. One could easily for forgiven for thinking several gags are aimed at Wes Craven's A Nightmare on Elm Street, when in actual fact that dreamtime slasher wasn't released until three years later. Furthermore, the horror conventions that we now all see as cliche and easy to ridicule surely weren't that entrenched in cinema by 1981, were they? Friday the 13th is the most obvious influence, what with its "sex = death" mantra and the unseen killer revealed in the closing segments gambit, but the film's other influences, like When a Stranger Calls (1979), Halloween (1978), Prom Night (1980), and even Carrie (1976) and Carnival of Souls (1962) from which the film heavily borrows some specific sequences, work in entirely different ways to the Friday blueprint that became rather standard throughout the decade. "Ahead of its time" is a term that could probably apply here, wouldn't you think?

Perhaps Student Bodies' most odd element is The Stick, an actor (of sorts) whose skinny frame gave him his nickname. He never acted again outside of the TV series Out of Control in 1984, but he remains a mystery. In fact, many of the actors featured either never worked again (such as the "final girl" or sorts, Kristen Riter) or not much. I think this has to do with a strike that was going on at the time, an event that lead to the director, Michael Ritchie, being credited as Allan Smithee. I'd assumed that name appearing in the opening credits was just a joke, but further research informs me that's not quite the case.

I really enjoyed Student Bodies, and it's certainly a stronger horror spoof comedy than any of the Scary Movie films (albeit, lacking a go hard or go home performance like that of Anna Faris). Even though it diminishes in value over the run time, that opening scene will certainly be something I'll be giggling about for quite some time. B

31 Horrors: Paranormal Activity 4 (#10)

Paranormal Activity 4

Dir. Henry Joost & Ariel Schulman

Country: USA

Aus Rating: M

Running Time: 88mins

Much like the Friday the 13th franchise, or the Saw series for a more recent example, the Paranormal Activity films have more or less settled into a comfortable groove by its fourth entry in as many years. While sequel rules dictate that the stakes be raised with each subsequent entry, the films – originally a $15,000 “found footage” movie directed by Oren Peli that took the box office by storm – have rarely reached beyond their fairly simple origins: a family find themselves haunted by a demonic spirit with a fondness for loud bangs in the night, levitation, throwing people around like rag-dolls, and pulling the doona covers off sleeping victims. The added extra of a cult-like institution in the series best Paranormal Activity 3 is about as radical as it has gotten so far, and Paranormal Activity 4 adds little that hasn’t been seen before. Alas, many viewers probably won’t have a problem with that.

Read the rest at Trespass Magazine

Review: We Need to Talk About Kevin

We Need to Talk About Kevin

Dir. Lynne Ramsay

Year: 2011

Aus Rating: MA15+

Running Time: 112mins

The boy at the centre of Lynne Ramsey’s first film in nine years is a slip of a thing. A skinny 15-year-old boy named Kevin, played here by Ezra Miller, whose tight shirts hug his lithe frame in a way that his mothers arms never did. The scant amount of scenes featuring this boy interacting with those who aren’t his family see him as somebody who goes generally unnoticed, unwilling to rock the boat with anyone who isn’t his long-suffering (and often insufferable) mother. Was Kevin born bad or were his actions, dutifully played out in Ramsay and Rory Stewart Kinnear’s unconventional and non-linear adaptation of Lionel Shriver novel, the result of a childhood being raised by a mother who saw him as little more than the reason she had to leave the big city. It’s the nature versus nurture debate and like the similarly themed (albeit, complete different) Elephant, the answer is probably a hearty shrug and flip of the hands, but the manner with which Ramsay has handled the material is the more inspiring accomplishment than anything resembling a resolution.

We Need to Talk About Kevin opens with a dizzying overload of sensory envelope pushing. What feels like a solid half an hour of little more than criss-crossing images from the life of Tilda Swinton’s brash Eva Khatchadourian, layered with an intricate and fragmented kaleidoscope sound design that paints a vivid and architectural image of this woman’s life before, during, and after the worst moment of her life. The bold, striking red of a visit to the La Tomatina festival in Valencia oozes into the flashing neon red of a police car’s headlights, which then flows into the imagery of Eva scraping dried red paint from the façade of her rickety house. Screams, chants and cheers merge on the soundtrack alongside Jonny Greenwood’s musical score before twisting into a stunning moment of revelation as Eva stands with her baby in a pram right next to a jackhammer at a construction sight, barely able to drown out the never-ending sound of her wailing child. Swinton’s face binds all these images and ideas together and it’s such a heady, intoxicating swell of emotions and feelings that it’s actually disappointing when Ramsay has to get down to actually telling the story that, ahem, she needs to talk about.

I was having trouble making heads or tails of the second half of this movie when a friend suggested that Swinton’s character is actually just a really unreliable storyteller. Was Kevin really that terrible of a child? Was her husband – John C Reilly as Franklin – really as cowardly and noncommittal as he appears or is it merely a figment of Eva’s unwell mind? Either way, I suspect an audience member’s reaction to the film as a whole will rely heavily on wheather they find these characters at all tolerable. Unfortunately Kevin becomes little more than a sociopathic Jason Voorhees with only one mode and a seemingly never-ceasing desire to inflict pain. Franklin on the other hand seems like such a whitewashed character that it’s almost as if there’s nothing even there for Reilly to perform.

The film’s best moments, outside of that exemplary opening gambit of a collage, are when it navigates the prickly aspects of Eva’s rotating world. The way a co-worker berates her under his breath at a Christmas party when she refuses to dance with him; her fierce determination to be normal as she waves across the street to a neighbour; the itchy skin she experiences when a wheelchair-bound student crosses her path and he proves to be the most sympathetic of all. Swinton is mesmerising to watch and her aghast facial expressions are some of her finest work. We Need to Talk About Kevin really does work best with Kevin is on the outer, a force that encroaches upon the lives of this world, but never really comes to be. It’s like when Hannibal Lector was so maniacally terrifying when seen briefly in Silence of the Lambs, and yet became a carnival freak show when given the increased camera time in Hannibal. Kevin is a forceful, powerful character on paper more than he is in flesh and blood. In flesh and blood he’s annoying and drags the film down no matter his age (played by Jasper Newell at age 8, and Rocky Duer as an infant).

We Need to Talk About Kevin is, like its UK quad posters suggest, some sort of radicalised horror movie. A demon child story in arthouse clothing with a villain as wise-cracking as Freddy Krueger and unrelentingly clunky as Michael Myers with Tilda’s Eva his tortured "final girl". Lynne Ramsay here is always doing interesting things with the medium and that certainly makes for involving filmgoing even when the characters and their actions are frustrating beyond belief. As it plays out in frenetic bursts, I admired its audacity, but just wished that somebody had indeed talked to Kevin rather than merely about him. B-

Campfire Tales

This Halloween saw me sick at home in bed watching horror movies. I guess it could've been worse! I hadn't intended on watching so many movies about groups of camping individuals being picked off one by one, it just happened to turn out that way!

I began by watching Steve Miner's Friday the 13th Part III and, well, my love for it is well documented (warning: really old blog entry there. don't hold that against me) and it didn't fail to entertain me like it always has. It's everything I want a Friday the 13th movie to be, really. This franchise was never "scary", barring the occasional scene or two, and for me got most of its charms in distilling the clichés of the era into a single finely made product. Friday the 13th Part III is fun, violent, inventive and looks great. Throw in the hilarity of the gloriously funny, but painful and unwatchable 3D and Part III remains my favourite entry in the franchise and the one I go to more frequently than any other and will likely remain that way until the franchise does a turn around from the nadir-skimming level it reached with the recent Michael Bay production from 2009. I don't watch these films to experience the visceral thrill that I would hope to get out of a Halloween film, so it works. As it turns out, I watched two Steve Miner films this Halloween (following Halloween H20) so maybe I should've watched Lake Placid to keep the unofficial Miner and camping themes going!

I followed that one up with two films I had never actually seen before (after swerves through Lake Mungo, Halloween and The Faculty) as I gave Tony Maylam's The Burning and Andrew Davis' The Final Terror a go. The Burning was a whole lotta fun and I actually liked it more than Friday the 13th, which had come out just one year before and obviously kicked the summercamp terror trend into high gear (neither are as good as Sleepaway Camp, but not much is). Gorgeous to look at, The Burning is a really efficient bit of filmmaking that I'm surprised isn't mentioned more often these days (especially with a cast that includes a cute and comedic Jason Alexander, Holly Hunter and Fischer Stevens and its origins as one of the first ever Miramax productions for Harvey and Bob Weinstein).

Oh sure, I could've done with a bit more action in the opening half rather than that really bizarre scene with the prostitute, which felt like it was from a completely different movie (one about unattractive prostitute), but the prologue and hospital sequence directly after are really great. The final showdown between the horribly burn victim and his camping prey is curiously unspectacular (it involves a lot of walking and looking and walking), but the whole thing is is still immensely enjoyable if you're into this particular type of horror filmmaking. The first half is actually very quiet on the horror front, but is never boring. Things soon pick up with the slaying and the maiming and the killling, and then there is, of course, that glorious raft sequence that earned The Burning a place on the list of UK's "video nasties". Seemingly realising that barely anybody had actually been killed so far in this film, the filmmakers went about killing five people in rapid succession. Lovely.

Having grown up in a country that doesn't have these summer camps, I always wonder if they're all at like what the movies suggest. Not so much with the stabbing and the slicing, but everything else? Are they really a place where young people are so opening sexual (there's a scene in The Burning where Jason Alexander, clearly the inspiration for Morgan Freeman's character in The Shawshank Redemption, hands out copies of porno magazines to the younger campers)? Are they little more than an extension of high school with bullying and cool/uncool cliques? Are all American summer camps located in such stunning scenery? I remember watching bad movies like Camp Cucamonga (with a young Jennifer Aniston and Urkle!) and Ernest Goes to Camp and wondering what it was all about. Why didn't Australia have this? Hmmm.

Nevertheless, The Burning? Yeah. The Burning! If I had one confusion about the whole thing, it was that I didn't understand why Cropsy (the killer, so called after his weapon of choice) was targeting these kids. It's not like Mrs Voorhees/Jason who target kids who come to "their" camp. No, Cropsy just seems to wanna kill these people who had nothing to do with his horrible disfigurement at a camp that wasn't even the one he worked at. It kind of all came together in the end, but I still wasn't buying it.

The third and final campers in peril horror title I watched was of a different vain, The Final Terror. Not so much about a pack of horny, loud school-aged kids at a summer camp, as it is a bunch of "forest rangers" and their girlfriends going camping. It lacks the sunny spooks of other films in the genre, preferring a palate of deep blues, greens and blacks that occasionally make the action undecipherable (to be fair, I was watching a VHS-quality transfer). This, however, gives it a far more menacing tone, especially when director Andrew Davis stages wonderful sequences of the villain (a strange, camouflaged, squealing monster person) stalking. One of note, by far the scariest scene in any of the three films discussed in this entry, comes about when the terrified campers seek refuge in a bus only to be taunted from all sides by the maniacal beast. It's a doozy of a scene and I just wish The Final Terror had more of them.

One other thing I liked was that the characters here are, compared to most other films of a similar kind, relatively smart. Apart from obvious stupidity to kick off the plot, they actually have an idea or two about camping and about survival in the wilderness. They devise plans when in trouble and more often than not realise when they're doing something wrong. Having Rachel Ward certainly helps, with her authoritative British tones proving to be an almost soothing presence, although nothing can help Daryl Hannah who proves here that she was always a terrible actress and will almost never not be one (Quentin Tarantino notwithstanding). If there are too many scenes of characters walking around going nowhere and doing nothing then that's a shame, but I was quite surprised that The Final Terror turned out to be less of a fun slasher romp than I was expecting than a twisting of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. Not as good, not even close, as that one, but somewhat impressive nonetheless. And far better than anything remotely suggested by the opening scene, so poorly acted that I thought I was set for a funny trip down bad 1980s slasher lane.

I was mainly just thankful they were all better than Cheerleader Camp!

Cinema of the Absurd: Friday the 13th: Part III (in 3D)

FRIDAY THE 13TH PART III (1982, dir. Steve Miner)




Nothing can prepare you for the onslaught of murder and mayhem that is present in Friday the 13th Part III. ...lol, sorry. I tried to type that with a straight face, but I couldn't keep it up. You really wanna know what there's an onslaught of in this film? Laughs. This movie has it all! Eye-poppings, knitting murders, small-town biker gangs, a weird disco soundtrack and it's all in glorious 3D!!!! Now, this was only in 3D on it's theatrical release in 1982 so unfortunately the DVD release just features characters throwing things at the screen, which has it's own wonderful entertainment value.

Plot: Following on directly after the quite dire Friday the 13th Part II, Part III again follows a bunch of teenagers at some random lake who don't know it yet, but are soon all going to be killed with humourous ways by Jason Vorhees - new and improved after dying in Part II and gathering a new mask (the debut of the famous Hockey Mask). Personally, I think the heavy-handed social commentary weighs it down but that's just me. :P. Let's discuss.

Warning: This entry contains images and discussion of violence. Please don't read if you wish to remain innocent and carefree *chuckle* Also, this is very Spoiler-heavy so don't be annoyed when I tell you who dies!

The Set-Up: The film starts with one of the scariest images you'll ever see. The words "Friday the 13th" and "Part III" appearing out of the eye sockets of the rotting head of Mrs Vorhees. That's not the scary part. The scary part is the absolutely mind-boggling DISCO SOUNDTRACK! Gloria Gaynor does Jason! I don't think this moment is bested as the film's most unintentionally hilarious moment. The Friday the 13th theme being turned into a disco inferno is priceless. And in 1982 no less.

After that brilliant title design we get a wonderful opening featuring two old people getting murdered! He gets an meat cleaver to the chest, while she gets the better death, by getting her knitting needle through the brain. Suffering for your art is so tiresome. Let's not even bother to mention who these two actually are. They're just randoms, which makes their deaths even more comical.

We then move on to the real story of the film. YOUNG MOSTLY-NAKED VICTIMS! You can always tell who the lead role is in these films because they always have a HIDDEN PAST. This is easy to spot as they are the one who looks off into the distance/at mysterious shacks/out across the lake/at the only exit/warns everybody to not go skinny dipping at midnight because they'll catch a cold.


This time we get the usual suspects. The girl with the mysterious hidden mystery past, the boyfriend, the best friend, the practical joker who will pretend he's been murdered early in the movie only to be murdered for real later on, etc. Oh, and randomly there's some hippies joining them? I don't even think they knew each other before this supposed road trip.

Hilariously we get a subplot involving a small town rebel motorcycle gang! These guys (well, 2 guys and one badass mofo chick) terrorise convenience stalls and like to hide out in empty barns. WOW. I don't really get why they are even in this movie other than to up the (inevitable) body count.

The Slaughter Begins: This is where some hilarity really happens. We get many many murders in Friday the 13th Part III (more than in the other two) with 12 altogether (including that poor bunny rabbit on the side of the road. We assume that was Jason's doing because he hates everything, even bunnies). The biker gang bite the dust in the barn (for no apparently reason) but there's a twist coming up later that is just too good. They die with the help of some 3D effects and farming tools. Priceless. It's also not explained why there is a barn right next to the lake in the first place, but that's just being pedantic, isn't it?


Other deaths come via spears in the eye (in glorious 3D), machetes to the body (while doing yoga!) - both can be seen above - and a retread of Kevin Bacon's death in the original Friday movie, we get a girl sitting in a hammock getting a sharp object in the neck! YAY! That one's hilarious because the make-up job is so bad. Really bad. There's some throat-slitting (the practical joker dies in such a boring way, it was really depressing)

And I'm not even going to tell you what happens to this chick. Hilarity ensued though. Also, in this movie, Jason dies twice! He first gets thrown of a balcony and hung in a noose. He then later, after somehow surviving, gets an axe to the face. The lead actress (Dana Kimmell btw) has two of the best reaction shots I've ever seen. "No! You can't be alive!" after realising he's alive for the first time and then a look of pure horror as Jason continues to come towards her even with an axe in his face. Way to go Dana! You're definitely my favourite Friday the 13th chick. It is this moment with the axe that includes the return of the bikie gang leader! Apparently he has Jason-style ability to survive impalings and such and returns rather randomly, but dies a mere second or two later. He gets his arm chopped off! Sweet.


The 3D: This film was made at the height of the 3D-'80s movement. As I mentioned earlier, the DVD release isn't actually in 3D so it features a lot of characters randomly waving sharp things at the camera. Thing such as bats, pitchforks, machetes, spears, axes, eyes and entire bodies and even yoyos (I suppose it was made at the height of yoyo popularity too?). It's all rather silly, but hilariously entertaining. Watch as the bikie leader waves a pitchfork around like a fool. I almost felt as if he was waving it at me (the point, I suppose) but makes me go "Why are you waving that thing at ME?!"

Jason: Jason is a hoot and a half in this flick. When he's not killing people in hilarious ridiculous manners, he's being an absolute moronic klutz. He has zero balance and falls over and the slightest touch and he gets his body parts (keep it clean people) stuck in all sorts of places (again, keep it clean). Although, he does have stellar aim!

Conclusion: Friday the 13th Part III is my favourite of the franchise. While the original is a fun-as-those-things-go type of affair, the second wasn't much cop and the others I have seen are mostly dumb. Jason in Manhattan would be a wonderful contender for this series if the movie was set in New York - only about 10 minutes of it are (and they are indeed absurd yet wonderful), and Jason X is just bad. But this one is So. Much. Fun. Even without the 3D it'd be a blast, but the added bonus of idiots waving silly objects around makes it even better! And who can go past the murders! Murders in 3D no less. Eyes popping out at you is just wonderful. The proposterousness (is that a word?) of the whole thing made me fall in love. It embraces all the cliches of the horror genre. This is a perfect movie to sit around with a group of friends (who like this sort of stuff), have some drinks, and laugh your freakin' ass off.

On the Absurdity scale from 1-5, I rate Friday the 13th Part III a 3.5
It's really absurd, but it's hard to penalise a movie that waves funny objects in your face and thinks it's scary!


(click the above image to watch a wonderful Friday the 13th Part III clipshow. Brilliant.

I really need to thank Ultra Secret Website for the images.