Final Girl Film Club - Hell Night

It's been a while since there's been a Final Girl Film Club pick, and I *almost* let this one slip by, but thank goodness I didn't because I enjoyed the heck out of this slice of horror from the Golden Year of 1981.



You know it's going to be good when the very first thing you see and hear is a delicious blood-curdling SCREEEEEAAAAM! Okay, that's kind of a fake-out, because we're actually at a wild and crazy frat party. Wet t-shirt contest! Five-gallon hats! Feathered hair! For sure, like, it's the 80s, man!

Once we get inside the frat house, we meet some of our major players. I give you...



Peter Purple-Cape! I'm not going to bother with most people's names, because my nicknames for them are way more awesome and easier to remember. Peter Purple-Cape is the president of the fraternity and the smarmiest guy you've ever seen. Here we see him putting the moves on some sorority chick who is quite free with her displays of boobage. PPC invites her to come upstairs and ... exchange phone numbers. That is not a euphemism, I'm sad to report. Peter is going to drag Boob Flash Girl all the way upstairs just so he can get her digits for future foolings around. For the president of a fraternity, Peter seems awfully misinformed about how these things work!

Next we have...



Final Girl Marti, who you may recognize as being played by The Exorcist's Linda Blair. I'll use Marti's actual name because she's the final girl and, well, she's Linda Blair. Peter Purple-Cape spots Marti across a crowded room and seems smitten. Maybe he will take her to a secluded place and ... find out her last name! *SCANDAL* A random girl in leopard skin (who we'll later discover is actually named May West - *rimshot*) explains that Peter "lives all year for Hell Night. This is when he really puts it to the pledges." (*insert "boing" sound*)

We also meet our other major players, who I'll call Robin Hood (right), Rich Dude In A Western (left),



and Flapper Girl.



PPC is asked by his frat brother, Pirate Boy, if it isn't about time to start the real festivities, Peter replies that it's still early, noting that Sickowski (yes, that's his name) hasn't barfed on the trophy case yet and none of the windows are broken. Cue the immediate breaking of the front window and the subsequent run-and-barf of the aptly named Sickowski. "Well, I guess it's time to get the show on the road!" Peter says with a laugh. Beedle-dee-bink-dee-bink - *cymbal crash* Oh, you crazy college kids!

So everyone at the party piles into cars for the pilgrimage to Garth House and once everyone arrives Peter walks them up to the house, explaining that the pledges have to spend the night in the old house, and he proceeds to tell everyone the Most Offensive Story of All Time. This is actually quite a well done walk-and-talk scene, containing the only few minutes in the first act that are actually creepy, but I'm afraid I was too busy boggling that people actually used to say words like "mongoloid" and "gork" to feel that scared. Oh, and that a woman could be described as a "hopeless simpleton" who was "only good for ... child-bearing." GAH. I also got stuck on the pregnancy that lasted "ten and a half months." I know there are records of longer pregnancies, but this was said as if it was no big deal.

Here's the short, less offensive version. Raymond Garth was the last in a long line of Garths who lived in Garth House, and twelve years ago (from 1981, making it 1969) he murdered his wife and three of his four children and hung himself, leaving his youngest ... let's say challenged son to witness it all. Police arrived on the scene and found only three corpses - the fourth body and the surviving son, Andrew, were never found. Andrew supposedly still lives in the house to this day - ooooooooh!

Peter Purple-Cape and the rest of the fraternity/sorority party-ers walk back to the gate and lock the four pledges in. It seems bizarre to me that there are only four pledges and that two of them are girls. I suppose they are pledges to a sister sorority, but we never hear it mentioned or named, only the fraternity. So here's our Death List:

- Rich Dude In A Western, who it turns out is an actual rich dude (so I'll call him Rich Dude for short);

- Marti, who is good with cars (she worked at her dad's auto shop in high school) and is regretting this whole Greek thing;

- Flapper Girl, who for some reason is British (she says "Hey, let's pah-tee!") and has brought Quaaludes and Jack Daniels for the pah-tee-ing, plus a cleavage radio; and

- Robin Hood, who is a surfer (you can tell because he keeps saying the word "radical") and wears the most adorkable Cupid boxers. No, seriously.



There is the predictable pairing off, and Rich Dude and Marti banter about the class divide (classic college conversation), wherein Rich Dude takes a guess that Marti is majoring in Political Science "with an emphasis in terrorism." Huh. Some things never change, I guess. Cut to Robin Hood and Flapper Chick in another part of the house, and they have a rather cute scene where he tells her what it's like to surf. I mean, besides the fact that you get to say "radical" a lot.

Soon Peter Purple-Cape arrives back at the house with Pirate Boy and May West. As they separate to take their stations for whatever shenanigans they've got planned, Pirate Boy makes my favorite line delivery of the movie, laughing like a goofball as he says "Now the fun begins!" Suddenly, a SCREAM is heard in the house. Marti and Rich Dude think it's the other couple and vice versa. The scream is followed by other noises that could not be more obviously coming from a sound effects machine. Rich Dude finds the speaker and cuts the power. I must say, at this point, there's not a lot of scary here. Just pranks and a little Marx Brothers homage, courtesy of Peter Purple-Cape and Pirate Boy: "We should have kept her behind and left the rest of her." It's so corny, I have to love it.

And just when you're getting a little bored and May goes to the side of the house for her part of the scare - WHOA! THERE'S the scary! YES! Andrew (who HAS been living in the house this whole time) pulls May down a hole and chops her head off with a butcher knife. GOOD SHOW, MOVIE! NOW we're getting somewhere!



The gang inside, knowing nothing of May's untimely demise and thinking it's all still a bunch of pranks, hears more noises. Robin Hood and Rich Dude go to investigate, leaving Marti alone to be confronted by this guy.



Looks spooky enough, but due to later discoveries I'm thinking he's probably another trick. Everyone inside decides that the whole thing is just Purple-Cape and some other folks playing around and try to get some sleep. On the icky, dusty, musty beds in the house. I don't know about y'all, but I would not want to be sleeping on old, uncleaned beds that someone might have died in. If I were REALLY tired, I could maybe kip on top of the covers, but under the covers - no way. There are a couple more prank scares (including a snakes-in-a-can gag which TOTALLY got me!), but from here on out it's genuine horror show. (!!!)

Peter Purple-Cape finds Pirate Boy's dead body and bravely runs away. Screw those pledges in the house (and May, since he doesn't know she's dead) - IT'S ALL ABOUT ME, DAMMIT! He plays a little cat-and-mouse with Andrew until he meets the business end of a scythe. SEE YA! Now all the pranksters are dead. Joke's on them, hahahahaha!

Marti and Rich Dude share weird stories about seeing magical creatures - she's seen a witch, he's seen an elf (lol, whut) - before they have schmoopy almost-sex. Speaking of sex, Flapper Girl and Robin Hood are having some (more) upstairs, which weirdly plays out for us mostly in shadowplay. Well, I think we all know what this means - all four of these kids are DEAD MEAT, amirite? Sex = Death. It's Rule #1 of horror movies. Sure enough, while Robin Hood goes to the "john" - and has the MOST HILARIOUS EXCHANGE EVER with his reflection in the mirror ("Score another one for the good guys."), Flapper Girl is greeted by ... I think it's supposed to be Raymond Garth, because it's not the same guy who killed the pranksters. When Robin Hood finishes shooting finger-guns at himself and gets back, he finds May's head in the bed, Flapper Girl nowhere to be seen, and screams like a girly-man and runs for it.

At this point, I've got to give it to the endangered kids in this movie. Where other movies have all these ridiculously noble characters who stick around and look for their missing friends, making it easier for the killers to get to them, too, these guys (or a few of them, at least) are all about the self-preservation. Which is perhaps not that admirable, but is pretty darn believable. Robin Hood climbs the sharp, spiky front gate (in a moment of genuine tension, in my opinion) while Rich Dude and Marti do the stupid, noble thing and go back to the house to look for Flapper Girl.

I'm going to take a moment here and love on the synth score in this movie. There, that was great. Moving on.

Rich Dude finds Peter Purple-Cape's body and makes what may be the WORST decision in the history of horror movies. He grabs Peter's flashlight off the ground and LEAVES the keys to the gate, which are still in Peter's cold dead fingers. I mean, DID HE THINK HE HAD TO CHOOSE????? I guess maybe in his horror at seeing a corpse, he just didn't notice them, but JEEZ!

Robin Hood goes to the police, who have heard QUITE enough stories about "murders" up at Garth House tonight, thankyouverymuch, and rudely tell him to leave. But on his way out he spots some ammo just lying around where anyone can get to it and snags himself a rifle before escaping out the window. LOL those Garths don't stand a chance!

While Rich Dude and Marti wait for Robin Hood to return, this happens.


LOOK BEHIND YOU!

Luckily Marti heard me yelling and turns around in time, shrieking like a Mikita drill and prompting Rich Dude to pitchfork the be-rugged figure. He orders Marti to pull the rug back off the whatever-it-is, but it's gone, having escaped down a trap door. Oh, it is ON. Rich Dude has HAD IT with these muthaf***in' killers in this muthf***in' mansion. He goes down the trap door, closely followed by Marti, and they come upon a series of tunnels. They follow one that seems to lead to a lighted area and find THIS.


I couldn't get a good cap of it that also was a good shot of Flapper Girl, but that's a dinner table, with a bunch of dead bodies around it, including Flapper Girl, with rats crawling all over them. GRODY!

Meanwhile Robin Hood, who has gone rogue liek woah, commandeers a car and drives back to the house, throwing all that lovely self-preservation instinct to the wind. He manages to take out one of the killers (Andrew, I presume) before being killed himself by Raymond (who I'm guessing is a zombie, because I thought it was established he killed himself - ah, well).

And since only one can survive in these kinds of stories, Marti is soon the lone pledge left at the party when Raymond throws Rich Dude out a window. Marti finds Peter's body, and - WHAT A CONCEPT - takes the keys, though she has way more trouble with this than there should be in wresting something from a dead person. She hotwires the car (remember, she's a gearhead - hello, characterization!) and gets away, but SURPRISE, Raymond is on top of the car and reaches through the windshield for her. She turns around to give him a good old impaling on the knocked-down fence and provide the Greatest Shot in the Entire Movie.


(Sorry it's a bit blurred, but I tried it about a dozen times and that's the clearest version I could get.)

I really, really dug this movie. The fact that everyone is in a cheesy costume is a fun touch, and I enjoyed the twist of "LOL it's all a joke - WHOA, NO IT'S NOT." If there was anything that disappointed me a little it was Linda Blair - until the last few minutes, at least. She just seemed so helpless and passive until she absolutely had no choice and no one to make decisions for her. I understand she was nominated for a Razzie for this movie in 1981 (losing out, or perhaps it should be "winning out," to Bo Derek in Tarzan, the Ape Man AND Faye Dunaway in Mommie Dearest - NO! WIRE! HANGERS!). As I said, she wins me over in the end, but for most of the movie I was not a fan.

Fun Factoid: This movie was directed by Tom DeSimone, the filmmaker who also gave us Chatterbox, which is maybe (hopefully?) the only movie to feature a talking and singing vagina. I ... have no more thoughts on that.

THIS movie, however, was pretty great. Thanks for another winner, Final Girl!

Final Girl Film Club - Blood and Roses

This month's Final Girl Film Club pick is Roger Vadim's vastly under-appreciated Blood and Roses. If you remember the series I did a couple of years ago on vampire movies, you might remember the well-established trope of the lesbian vampire, originating from Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu's short novel Carmilla. Carmilla the novel actually pre-dates Stoker's Dracula by about 25 years and there have been several interpretations of it, either literal retellings of the story or other tales that follow the female vampire trope with varying degrees of lesbian subtext (and often plain text). Perhaps the best known and most faithful adaptation is The Vampire Lovers (1970), part of Hammer Horror's Karnstein Trilogy. I'm quite fond of that one, but I do believe I like Blood and Roses even more.


Blood and Roses (1960)

The story begins on an airplane - a setting far removed from the 18th century trappings of the original novel. We hear some vague drivel in voice over about the spirit world, and there's no explanation as yet for why a vampire who has been alive for hundreds of years is flying the friendly skies. We travel to Italy, to a branch of the Karnstein estate. A count, Leopoldo, is about to be married and he's consulting a pyrotechnics expert to design a fireworks show for his engagement party. The fireworks expert has found the perfect spot for the spectacle - the abbey on the estate. This causes some concerned looks from several people in the room, because this is where the old Karnstein cemetery used to be. Thankfully, all the tombs have been empty for a couple of centuries, but this leads to some half-amused/half-serious discussion of the old Karnstein vampire legend.

Leopoldo's cousin, Carmilla, tells the story of her ancestor Millarca (anagrams yay!), who died the night before her wedding in the arms of her lover Ludwig, who swore eternal faithfulness. There is a clear parallel between Carmilla and Millarca and, in turn, between Leopoldo and Ludwig. Leopoldo is marrying a young woman named Georgia, though, and it's clear from the start that Carmilla is jealous. At the engagement party, Carmilla sulks and drinks in her room but eventually joins the party at Leopoldo's infuriated insistence. After a few moments at the party, however, she wanders off again, toward the cemetery. Some unexpected explosions from the fireworks display open Millarca's tomb, and voila - Carmilla is dead, her spirit replaced by that of the sleeping vampiress.

I'd only ever seen one other of Vadim's films, Pretty Maids All in a Row, but I knew enough about Vadim as a filmmaker to be aware of his reputation for sensuality. This seems more restrained than I'd have expected from him, but it still manages to have definite erotic undertones with little winks of partial nudity and, of course, the lesbian subtext which is not as overt as in The Vampire Lovers but is certainly still there. In particular, I have to love Leopoldo's strangely gleeful expression as his fiancee undresses the unconscious Carmilla. See something you like there, dude?

I really, really dug this film. The look is very dreamlike, and a lot of credit must go to Annette Vadim (who plays Carmilla/Millarca) for giving the film its melancholy soul. The highlight of the film, though, is a surreal sequence where Millarca seduces Georgia and enters her subconscious. Wonderfully bizarre stuff and quite ahead of its time. And man, I love the ending.

Great movie. Thanks to Final Girl for picking it.

Final Girl Film Club - Frozen

February's Final Girl Film Club is the ski lift chiller (*rimshot*) Frozen.


BRRRRRRRRR!

I'm tweaking a previous review here, but giving it a bit more context. I was fortunate enough to see this at Butt-Numb-A-Thon (BNAT) in Austin (held at the Alamo Drafthouse) in December 2009, about a month before it made a more official bow at Sundance. This film played roughly 2/3 of the way through our 24-hour cinematic journey (roughly 2am) - the 8th film out of a total 12 - and was sandwiched between Jean-Pierre Jeunet's then-new film Micmacs and the banned Shaw Brothers flick Centipede Horror. (NOTE: Centipede Horror is not to be confused with Tom Six's The Human Centipede; Centipede Horror has REAL centipedes, not to mention flaming zombie chickens.) We'd had a couple of mild forays into semi-horror already that evening, with Shutter Island and The Lovely Bones, and everyone expected great things from Adam Green, the guy who made Hatchet and who showed up and braved a probably very ripe-smelling and farty room to personally introduce the film to us.

As with most of the films over the 24 hours, this one was preceded by some appropriate vintage trailers.


The Ski Bum

and


Hot Dog: The Movie

I love the Alamo Drafthouse.

So anyway ... FROZEN.



This movie is about three young people - a guy, his girlfriend, and his best friend - who go for a short ski trip. They spend most of the day on the bunny slopes, because the girlfriend is not an experienced skier, and the guys decide to go up again that evening by themselves to do some real skiing. After some arguments and hurt feelings, however, the girlfriend ends up going with them, and they get stuck on the chair lift while the place shuts down for the week.



Okay, so let's get the implausibilities out of the way, because they are many and pretty egregious. These kids must have driven a car to this place (though it's possible they took a shuttle). If they drove, someone would have noticed an extra car and asked whose it was, realizing that someone could still be on the mountains, possibly even trying to get a free night's stay or extra skiing they didn't pay for. Second, no skiing establishment is that lackadaisical about people being on the chair lift or on the mountain. You wouldn't be able to bamboozle someone into letting you on the chair lift without paying in the first place, and you certainly wouldn't have one solitary chair lift operator be the final word in whether everyone was down from the lift and the mountain. There are way too many precautions in place at ski resorts for what happens in this movie to happen. Third, wolves don't hang out where there are loads of people skiing.

HOWEVER. Forget about all that for a minute. What if you DID get stuck on a chair lift and there was no way down and no one would find you for several days? If you take it from there, this is a pretty fantastic scary movie about the series of bad decisions you might make in the huge effort to get out alive. Decisions that are bound to be further hampered by the extreme cold weather and its effect on your brain.



The first huge mistake is made when the boyfriend decides to try and jump down, however much it might injure him. Well, it injures him a hell of a lot. Both his legs snap (there were some excellent sound effects in this film, by the way), and when he tries to move himself, he just injures himself exponentially more and more. A wolf finds him and eventually leaves after a stare-down, but this is not a victory for our poor broken-legged hero. Oh no. The wolf went and got a few friends and they proceed to eat him alive while his girlfriend and best friend can only listen to his screams and do their best not to watch from above. This was fairly affecting to me, actually, as the guy screams to his best friend not to dare let the girlfriend look. Story issues aside, there was still some pretty great acting in this, I have to say.

The rest of the movie alternates between the girlfriend and best friend blaming each other, consoling each other, and making fresh attempts to get out of this situation. Strangely, they make little attempt to huddle together and actually keep each other warm, which might have been helpful. And I can't figure out why the girl, after losing one of her gloves, didn't pull her coat sleeve over her bare hand. That would have saved a lot of pain, especially when she wakes up with her bare hand frozen to the safety bar.


OWWWWWWWW!

The movie manages to be very effective, though, despite it's implausibility issues, and was one of the better examples of audience reaction of the evening. A woman in our audience actually FAINTED during this movie (she was alright, by the way, just overcome by the movie, it seems). This was probably the most talked about film at the post-BNAT dinner and party. Several in our crowd were from Minnesota and had HUGE issues with its plausibility. But there was no doubt that it made an impact.

Regardless, though, if you can let go of the need for accuracy and credibility, it's a pretty dang good scary movie.

Final Girl Film Club - Sugar Hill

Time for another round of Final Girl Film Club! This month's selection is the blaxploitation zombie flick Sugar Hill. Indicentally, the neighborhood in Harlem where I live is called Sugar Hill, so I felt a connection to this movie right off the bat. Also, this is a Samuel Z. Arkoff and AIP production (that's American International Pictures, not Amazingly Idiotic Productions), and if that name means anything to you, a) you probably watch too much MST3K, and b) this movie probably just jumped up several points on your AwesomeMeter.



The film begins with what appears to be a voodoo ritual - drums, dancing, chicken blood, you probably know the drill. The natives are voodoo-ing to the particularly groovy strains of "Supernatural Voodoo Woman" by The Originals - a song that's a bit too slow for what's going on, until - wait a minute. It's not an actual voodoo ritual. The lights have come up now and what we've just been watching is the floor show at the popular Club Haiti.

We meet Diana Hill (aka "Sugar") and her man Langston, who owns the club. They are a loving pair, which is good because this is the only opportunity the movie is going to offer us to be invested in their relationship at all. Some thugs come around, talking trash, and Sugar begs Langston not to provoke them - "I just don't want anything to happen to mah man," she says. But lo, something does happen to her man, and the thugs, all white men except for the pimptastic Fabulous (yes, that is his name) beat Langston to death.

Sugar swears revenge and goes to visit Mama Maitresse (which may, in fact, just be a fancy name for "mattress") to order up some zombie-style retribution. Mama Maitresses (played by Zara Cully, aka Mother Jefferson) conjurs up this guy, Baron Samedi (played by the disturbingly cheerful Don Pedro Colley)...



...who commands a gang of zombies who, when they lived, were plantation slaves who died of fever. These dead-heads, it must be said, are fairly awesome zombies. Sugar is told "Put them to evil use; it's all they know or want." These are happy zombies, and you can tell because they SMILE. CREEPY! Perhaps even creepier - they have shiny ping-pong ball eyeballs that make them look like bugs.



So Sugar summons the zombies, who are much more like Inferi than traditional zombies in that they don't just shuffle and eat; they actually do someone's bidding. The zombies kill the guys who killed Langston, and that's pretty much the story. The script, when not dealing with the zombies, is pretty painfully bad, though the actors do what they can with it. What sets this apart are the aforementioned zombies and some rather unique kills. My favorite is when Sugar uses voodoo to make one of the guys stab himself. And once it's down to just the main bad guy, we pan around the group of zombies and his recently killed cronies are among their number! So not only has Sugar killed them, she now commands them to do her will!

There are so many things to love about this movie, but the greatest and strangest is Sugar's two separate identities, the purpose of which is never really addressed. All I know is that Sugar looks like this when she's not doing zombie things.



And like this when she's an ass-kicking zombie queen.



There may be something metaphorical there, but that's probably giving the filmmakers way too much credit.

There are definitely problems with this movie, but what works REALLY works. Sugar Hill is, in 70s parlance, DYNAMITE!

Final Girl Film Club - The Initiation of Sarah

It's been several months since I actually participated in the Final Girl Film Club in a timely fashion. I usually either watch the movie too late (which is pretty much every month) or just can't bring myself to write something about it (Hellbound and the annoyingness of Jackson and the dearth of Chuck Norris ass-kicking depressed me to no end). But NOT THIS TIME.



Oh my gosh, you guys! I'm so enraptured with this month's pick, I can hardly express it! But I'll try.

The Initiation of Sarah was one of several "The [SOMETHING] of [SOMEONE]" movies from the 1970s. FinalGirl did a whole Awesome Movie Poster Friday post about them - The Reincarnation of Peter Proud, The Eyes of Laura Mars, The Haunting of Julia, The Possession of Joel Delaney. Whatever else these movies were about, you know from the title that SOMEONE is going to have SOMETHING happen to them. Which I guess is fairly basic for a movie plot, but it just SOUNDS EXCITING, doesn't it?

This was a made-for-TV movie with a pretty HAWESOME cast. You've got Kay Lenz, who has been on pretty much every television show ever, was in both Rich Man, Poor Man (!!) and the sequel, and has the distinction of being the first Mrs. David Cassidy. You've got Morgan Brittany, who is probably best known as Pamela Ewing's half-sister on Dallas (!!!). You've got Robert Hays of Airplane! fame ("Surely you can't be serious."). You've got Morgan Fairchild, who is ... MORGAN FLIPPING FAIRCHILD. And you've got Shelley Winters, who is just plain rules the planet with her awesomely brassy and badass self.



This is very much a 70s movie, and you can see it from the first frame. The soft lighting, the credits, appearing in a font that looks like it's right off a package of Massengill. The disco music. Every frame of this movie looks like it was cut out of an old JCPenney catalog, and I LOVE IT.



We begin on a beach at dusk. It's the last beach party of the summer and Sarah and her sister Patty are having some fun, yo! Until the guy who takes Patty off for a swim turns out to be a rapist. We then get our first glimpse that Sarah is a little different. She's a good distance from Patty and her attacker, but a few jumpy camera moves and a "STOP IT!" later and Mr. Rapist is thrown back into the water so that Patty can escape. Yes, that's right - Sarah has some telekinetic mojo.

Because the other thing this film is besides a 70s-fest and a "something of someone" movie is a ... let's just call it an homage to Brian DePalma's Carrie. Unpopular girl turns out to have powers, so you'd better not mess with her or she will set the whole school on FIRE.

Sarah and Patty leave for college. It's clear that they're quite close. It's also clear that one of them is adopted, because while mommy gushes over Patty and gives her enthusiastic advice about how to pledge a sorority, she says farewell to Sarah as if it's an afterthought. Patty is excited about rushing, because Mommy was once a member of Alpha Nu Sigma - the hottest sorority on campus - which should mean both girls have a leg up in becoming pledges. But poor adopted Sarah is worried people will go digging into her past, a past which even she knows nothing about.

The girls go to sorority row, which seems abysmally empty considering it's meant to be Rush Week. Their first stop is the Alpha Nu house, where Patty is taken to meet some of the other actives and Sarah is taken ... to the refreshment table. Just when I thought I couldn't love this movie more, suddenly Sarah has like 70% of my college experience in the span of a few minutes. I RELATE TO YOU, GURL! The Alpha Nus are a special brand of snotty bitches, and their Head Bitch in Charge is none other than Jennifer Lawrence (Morgan Fairchild).




"Stranded at the punch bowl ... branded a fool.
What will they say ... Monday at school?"

The girls then go to the Pi Epsilon Delta house, which the Alpha Nu girls have nicknamed "Pigs, Elephants, and Dogs." Yeah, it's lame, but it's still mean. They're an older house, the girls are more brainy than beauty, and they don't really do the tradition thing. Naturally, they love Sarah, and she feels a connection to them too. But more than anything, she doesn't want to be parted from her sister. Mommy, however, thinks it's time that Patty and Sarah went their own ways.

Soon it's time for the girls to find out which sororities want them, and, predictably, Patty ends up with the snooties and Sarah ends up chosen by only one sorority, the "Pigs, Elephants, and Dogs," which she calls "P.E.D." like it's a venereal disease. Jennifer and the other Alpha Nus forbid Patty to talk with any P.E.D.s. including her own sister, for the duration of pledging, leading Sarah to run off by herself and cause another strange accident. It's starting to get confusing, though. Does she actually cause these things to happen? Or does she sense that they will happen in time to save someone from getting hurt. I think we're meant to understand that she actually causes these things to happen, but a couple of times it's not clear.

Patty and Sarah move into their respective houses, and we get some generic spooky mood setting in the P.E.D. house. There's a room that's always locked that only the house mother, Mrs. Hunter, has ever gone into. Oh, and by the way, the house mother is SHELLEY WINTERS. This is ... not her finest acting moment, but she's Shelley Winters, so that's okay. She's supposedly very into the occult and has been working on a thesis on the topic for hundreds of years or whatever. She calls Sarah into her room to get to know her a bit better, and it looks like the writers meant to drop some heavy clues here that Mrs. Hunter is Sarah's biological mother. It's never resolved beyond this one scene, but I suspect it was originally meant to be and they just ran out of time or had to cut that particular subplot. In any case, Mrs. Hunter recognizes Sarah's special abilities and you can tell already that she's thinking of how to exploit them.



Sarah makes friends with her sorority sisters (and even, bizarrely, becomes their leader, even though she hasn't even been initiated into the sorority yet) and develops an almost-relationship with her cute Psych T.A., Paul. She has a standoff with the snooty Jennifer, using her powers to send her for a swim in a campus fountain, and oh honey, it is ON. Jennifer goes to Patty, pretending that she feels bad about how she treated Sarah and even hinting that she'd like to invite her to join Alpha Nu Sigma. She weasels some details out of Patty, including that she's been spending a lot of time with Paul, and Jennifer hatches her plan. It's very clearly inspired by the Carrie prank, but while it's not as iconic, it's still incredibly mean and sends Sarah into revenge mode (again like Carrie), egged on by Mrs. Hunter, who has a longstanding grudge against Alpha Nu Sigma and Jennifer's mother. The initial revenge is a bit lackluster - Sarah telepathically causes Jennifer (and inadvertently her sister Patty) to be trapped in a shower with scalding hot water pouring on them. (I will give the film points, though, for not only referencing the shower scene in Carrie but for giving an unexpected nod to women in prison flicks with the two chicks in the shower - you go, movie!)



Speaking of Carrie, though, here are some more parallels. Jennifer is quite clearly the Nancy Allen character - the leader of the mean girls who sets up the prank. Her boyfriend Scott (played by Airplane!'s Robert Hays) is a cross between the John Travolta character who helps her with the prank because he's under her sexual spell (they have some of the ugliest fake kissing I've ever SEEN, blech!) and the William Katt character who feels sympathy for her. Patty is the Amy Irving character who reluctantly participates in some (though not all) of the taunting, but is actually really nice. And Mrs. Hunter is kind of the inverse of Piper Laurie, an enabler rather than an abuser.

Everything comes to a head on the night of initiation, and here's where the film falls a bit short. It's not horrible, it's just ... I think the film takes on a bit more than it can handle given its limitations. If this were a theatrical feature and not a TV movie, they could have gone full on Suspiria with the crazy ritual stuff. As it is, it's kind of a jumbled mess. I do kind of love the jumps back and forth between the fairly innocuous Alpha Nu initiation (part of which includes feeding the blindfolded initiates peeled grapes and telling them they're eyes) and the more sinister P.E.D. ministrations (where the girls wear what can only be described as black KKK hoods - WTF?!). Mrs. Hunter wants to use Sarah to bring down the Alpha Nu house, particularly Jennifer (who becomes horribly disfigured), and restore P.E.D. to its former glory. For some reason, this involves a human sacrifice, and one of the girls (who has apparently already had blood taken from her for the ritual) is trapped-but-not-really under the table awaiting the fulfillment of this purpose. Everyone manages to escape, however, leaving Sarah to have a final showdown with Mrs. Hunter, ending with the two of them dying in a fiery flame of burning fire and leaving the viewer to think to herself "Well, that made no sense."


Um, what the--?

Even though the ending is a bit "bzuh?" I really loved this. It gets MAJOR style points, if nothing else, and there's some fairly good characterization. Nobody felt like a generic "bad guy" or "good guy." I adored Kay Lenz, and she really pulled off the girl-who's-pretty-but-so-down-on-herself-you-can't-see-it. Yet again, much like Sissy Spacek in Carrie.

Anyway, despite my misgivings about the plot and the very obvious influence of Carrie, I thought this was awesome. Would watch again.

Final Girl Film Club - Black Sabbath

Black Sabbath

This month's entry in the Final Girl Film Club is an anthology film made in 1963 by the great Mario Bava, Black Sabbath (or The Three Faces of Fear). There's an intro and outro to the three tales, presided over by none other than Boris Karloff, who assures us that monsters are real and all around us. Also, that vampires like going to the movies, so there could be one sitting right next to you, muahahahahaha!

Some fun trivia: - Black Sabbath the movie is indeed where the band Black Sabbath got its name. - Black Sabbath inspired Quentin Tarantino and Roger Avary in their writing of Pulp Fiction.

THE TELEPHONE

And yet another plot rendered obsolete by the invention of cell phones and caller ID. I sometimes miss the days of less technology, when something like The Telephone would have been truly unsettling for a contemporary audience.

This is a fairly good Polanski-esque real-world (i.e., not supernatural) thriller with some interesting twists, especially for so short a story. Bava, as usual, displays his wonderful eye for sets and of course for lovely women. This starts as your standard "threatening phone call" plot, and at first I couldn't help thinking of the silly story of The Viper, who keeps calling this woman at her apartment ("This is The Viper! I'm coming up!") and is mistaken for someone with ill intent until he arrives with a bucket and says "I am The Viper! I'm here to vipe and vash your vindows!" Yes, I'm well aware of how lame it is, but I thought of it every time the phone rang at the beginning of this story.

So basically Rosy is receiving some threatening phone calls, which eventually no longer remind me of The Viper but instead of the famous opening of Scream with Drew Barrymore. The caller seems to be close by, apparently spying on Rosy, and says he's going to kill her. Rosy calls her ... friend, Mary (okay, ex-lover), for help, but the caller (who we eventually surmise is a man she knows named Frank, who has recently escaped from prison after Rosy was responsible for putting him there) seems to be aware of this as well. There's a nice couple of twists that I won't spoil, but they do have some classic flaws that force you to draw your own conclusions and connect some dots. That's really the only thing I can say against it, as it's otherwise a very effective bit of suspense.

This works well on its own, but if he had wished, Bava could have expanded it into a feature. The spare details leave lots of room to explore the characters and the way their lives intertwine. In fact, some viewers seem to have done a bit on their own. For instance, on the Wikipedia page, the article's author has taken an exchange between Mary and Rosy and extrapolated it to draw the conclusion that Rosy is actually a prostitute who has testified against her pimp (Frank). That is certainly a possibility, though there isn't enough to go on in the story to actually make that a solid conclusion, but it's a place you could go if you wanted to expand this story.

THE WURDALAK Where The Telephone is a story that could have been made into a full-length film, The Wurdalak feels like a story that should have been. There is enough story here to fill a feature, and the main flaw is that it's simply too much to cram into what is already the longest of the three shorts. The story follows a Russian Count, who finds a decapitated corpse on the side of the road. The corpse belonged to a "wurdalak", a living corpse that is sustained by human blood (in other words, a vampire). The wurdalak most craves the blood of those he loved in his life. The Count, Vladimir, stops at a small cottage inhabited by a family who is anxiously awaiting the return of the patriarch, Gorcha (played by Boris Karloff), who has gone out to kill the wurdalak - successfully, it appears - but who warns his family that if he is not back in five days, they will have to kill him, because he will have become a wurdalak himself. Don't ask me what's so special about five days - this is one of many things that could have been better handled in a longer film.

Gorcha returns at the stroke of midnight on the fifth day, and sure enough, the family's worst fears are confirmed. They are reluctant to kill him, because they love him, but this reluctance brings terrible consequences as he kills his son Pietro and kidnaps and eventually kills his little grandson Ivan. Pietro is staked and beheaded, to prevent him from returning as a wurdalak, but the child's mother will not permit such a thing to happen to her little boy, so they bury him without taking the extra steps. Of course, he rises from the grave as a wurdalak, and in one of the saddest things I've ever seen in a horror film, goes back to the house and begs to be let back in, which will naturally lead to the demise of the rest of the family who are unwilling to act against one another.

This is a surprisingly strong vampire story, and it reminds me once again of one of the many things that bothers me about the Sparkleverse. One thing that unites all other vampire tales is that there is a definite karmic cost to being a vampire. Vampirism is a curse, It's not like a bad haircut or being from the wrong side of the tracks. What strikes me the most about The Wurdalak is how sad it is, how tragic, that their love for one another turns them into monsters.


THE DROP OF WATER

The shortest and strongest of the three. This is most people's favorite, I think, and for good reason. It could really stand alone as a short film, and it's a GREAT ghost story that you could totally imagine being told by a campfire, except that you really have to see it to get the full effect.

A nurse goes to the deathbed of her patient to prepare the body for the funeral. She notices a ring on the woman's finger, and while the housekeeper is in another room, she steals it. Suddenly, she notices a fly buzzing around, but this doesn't really surprise her, as it's perfectly natural for flies to be around a dead body, but it unsettles her for some reason. When she arrives home, she hears the sound of dripping water. She goes to the bathtub and stops the dripping from the faucet. The sound stops. She goes into another room and begins to hear the dripping again. She goes to a sink and does the same thing, and it stops. Until she leaves the room and it starts again. She notices her umbrella, still wet from the rain and dripping on the floor. She picks it up and shakes it out, lying it flat so it won't drip anymore and finally, permanently, the dripping stops. But she's pretty wigged. Adding to the sense of dread is some strange light effects coming in through the window, as if this nurse, living in the (as best I can tell from the costume) early 20th century, is next door to an all-nite Krispy Kreme.

What follows is a classic ghost story "gotcha" sequence that's made all the more frightening by the creepy visage of the dead woman (pictured above). This was apparently all done with a mannequin, but GAH is it ever terrifying. There's a cool little twist at the end that suggests someone else might meet the same fate as the poor nurse. Bottom line - don't mess with the dead. They'll get you!

***

Great little trilogy of films. Thanks as always to FinalGirl for the impetus to watch it.

Final Girl Film Club - The Devil's Rain

This month's Final Girl Film Club selection is the 1970s satanist film The Devil's Rain. So let's get to it!

"Did I leave the oven on?"

There's "so bad it's good" and then there's "so bad it's gone past good and back to bad again." The Devil's Rain is decidedly the latter. Which is a damn shame, because it has so much going for it.

First, there's the cast. When you have William Shatner, Ida Lupino, Tom Skerrit, Keenan Wynn, Eddie Albert, AND Ernest Borgnine (as a goat-man devil worshipper - !!!), your film simply CAN'T suck, can it? Sadly, it can, and this one does.

Second, I'm a big believer in the notion that there are no bad ideas, just bad executions of ideas. If you look hard enough, you can see the potential in this story, and perhaps pieces that other filmmakers turned into honest-to-goodness decent films. The scary, powerful book reminds me of the Necronomicon in The Evil Dead. The reincarnation of Corbis was reminiscent of the reincarnation of Pumpkinhead. There's a good movie in here somewhere, but the writer, director, and Satanic consultant they hired for this film can't find it with two hands and a flashlight.

Third, this movie doesn't hold back on the gross. Not blood, but there are some rather cool and disgusting melty effects. I almost never get physically, literally sick at my stomach watching movies, but the extended meltyness at the end made me seriously queasy.

The main thing that's wrong here is the story. It's incomplete, first and foremost. It's like the screenwriters were telling the story in their own heads and only put half of it down on paper, and not even a cohesive half, but scattered bits that just add up to a half.

We start with a bunch of close-ups of Heironymus Bosch paintings and the sound of people moaning in agony over the opening credits. These take far too long, by the way, and if you're padding your film out in the credits, this is not a good sign for things to come. In the opening scene, Emma Preston (Ida Lupino) worries a lot and spills hot tea all over a man named John. Her son Mark (William Shatner, still carrying the Star Trek cuteness) returns home, having gone out to look for his father Steve, but without success. Steve returns, looking very waxy-faced, and tells the family to give "the book" (whatever that might be) back to Corbis (whoever that might be), before quite literally melting into a puddle of goo right before their (and our) eyes.

Emma wants Mark to take the book to Corbis, but he won't do it. So she tries to give him a huge, clunky amulet instead. Daddy's truck returns driverless, but there's a voodoo doll on the steering wheel that is presumably meant to be Emma. Mark goes back to the house to find John hanging upside down and screaming like a little girl and Emma missing, prompting him to scream "KHAAAAAN!" "CORBIS!" before heading off to face the whoever named Corbis, armed with his gun and the amulet. John will presumably have to fend for himself in Mark's absence.

Next there is some more movie padding. Landscape. Slow driving. Stopping to wipe brows and look at the scenery. More slow driving. Slow pulling into places. Church. Ghost town. House. I swear there is even some rolling bramble (it's the West, y'all!). Then he meets an incredibly winky Ernest Borgnine, who he doesn't realize at first is the latest incarnation of Corbis. Mark proposes a duel of faiths - his mother and father returned to him if he wins, the book and himself to Corbis if he loses. After lots of random satanic ritual stuff, Mark loses the battle, presumably too freaked out by the weirdness and Corbis's insistence on calling him some strange name to do anything but shoot panicky bullets from his gun and try to run away before finally being captured.

Random, sudden cut to Dr. Eddie Albert and his assistant Dr. Tom Skerrit, Mark's brother (conveniently named) Tom. There's some meaningless parapsychological babble, and Tom's wife Julie speaks psychically while having visions of what's happening to Mark. SCREEEAAM! End scene.

Tom bickers with Sheriff Keenan Wynn and goes to the ghost town after his brother, after leaving a message with the clearly incapacitated John. Meanwhile, the ritual to bring Mark to the dark side has begun. Tom and Julie arrive and find the "church" where the ritual was taking place and Julie (I think) recognizes it (eventually) from her visions. Tom finds Mark's shirt, helpfully labeled "Preston," before they hear an explosion and go outside to find their car has blown up.

Tom finds a satanized John Travolta (in his very first film), and Julie looks into his black devil eyes to find a flashback to Pilgrim times, where some familiar faces let us know that the Preston family has betrayed Corbis by taking the book several hundred years ago and turning him over to a burn-at-the-stake mob.

Tom sends Julie back home in Mark's car, but newly satanized Momma is waiting for her in the back seat in what turns out to be the only real scare in the movie. Tom then inexplicably watches the last of Mark's ritual without saying or doing anything to help or even reacting much in any discernible way.

There is then some rather stunningly bland exposition with Tom and Dr. Eddie Albert, and the audience is left to wonder how the hell they know about any of this or figure it out at all. But it's too late for the story to follow any kind of logic, so we move on to yet another ritual, this time with Julie. While that's happening, Tom and Eddie find the eponymous Devil's Rain - a big jar that contains the souls of everyone whose name is in the book. This is a fairly good effect for 1975, I must say, with the window of the jar looking like a distorted television screen showing people clawing and moaning and reaching. Sadly, the rest of the movie is nowhere near this dubious calibre.

And then comes the climax, and if you thought the rest of the movie made no sense, you ain't seen nuthin' yet. I'd try to explain it, but I'd fail almost as badly as this film does in the end. I'd say if you want to watch this movie at all, though, the last 20 minutes are really the only parts worth watching. And probably 10 minutes or more of the last 20 are some of the grodiest, and definitely the waxiest, meltiest images you have ever seen. It ultimately takes too long, is not worth watching for the amount of time it lasts, and is definitely not worth sitting through the other 80 minutes of the movie, but it's pretty spectacular nonetheless.

Now, I've got nothiing against wacky movies that make no sense. William Girdler's The Manitou, for example, is pretty awesomesauce. But The Devil's Rain is like crack jelly scraped over too much bread. There's a little to enjoy, but not nearly enough to justify a feature length film.

Bonus Lameness: The tagline for this film, which is on all the posters and is even spoken in the trailer, is "Heaven help us all when THE DEVIL'S RAIN." There is so much grammatically wrong with that sentence, I can't even begin to explain it, except to ask "When the Devil's Rain what?"