I noticed from the end credits that this was shot in 3D. I didn’t pick up on that from the movie itself, but it does somewhat explain one weird part where the killer throws an ax toward the camera and it turns into fake-looking animation. I’m surprised they made the effort to shoot it that way, because the photography doesn’t give the impression of effort, or at least skill. It’s on the level of the more home-made-but-at-least-shot-on-film slashers like THE NIGHT BRINGS CHARLIE, very low on style or atmosphere. Those are two things that are more important in horror than in most other genres, especially one like this that has obvious lifts – or let’s say coincidental parallels to – movies we’ve all seen that do have those qualities.

I can’t say it’s entirely unoriginal, because a bunch of the details are effortlessly weird, and that’s what makes it arguably semi-worthwhile. For one thing, the rampaging patient didn’t escape the hospital – he was released due to a clerical error, because his name is Howard Johns and they meant to release John Howard. And actually they probly shouldn’t have even released the other guy, because they’re in the middle of releasing a bunch of dangerous patients due to budget cuts. You figure that might’ve been caused by Reaganomics, but apparently it’s just the whim of the evil head of the hospital, who rather than trying to help the police locate his missing patient forges a death certificate and claims he’s not loose, he’s just cremated.

The protagonist, Dr. Joan Gilmore (Belinda Montgomery – Doogie Howser’s mom) is the whistleblower who figures out what happened, but she’s a really shitty whistleblower. When she finds out a dangerous psychotic is on the loose she doesn’t go to any type of authorities, she waits until the next day to tell her boss (the evil guy), who calls a meeting to discuss it. Later she sneaks around and finds out the other doctors are doing weird experiments on some of the patients, but nothing much comes of that.

To Joan’s credit, when it becomes clear after a couple days that nobody is gonna fuckin do anything she does go out on her own (on her weekend) and try to find Howard herself. She goes to the sheriff at the college where the massacre took place. He’s played by Sydney Lassick from ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO’S NEST, a fat, lazy, bald and effeminate sheriff. I bet when somebody wrote the line “Just because the god damn broad is so good lookin’ doesn’t mean we all have to think with our dicks!” they didn’t realize it would be delivered in sort of a Rip Taylor type of voice. To the sheriff this shit is personal because he still has the scar to prove he got his throat slit by this guy, who he refers to as “that screwball, Howard Johns.” Then he proceeds to not believe anything Joan says and stay in his office.

He won’t let Joan read the files but tells her to go talk to the newspaper, which I think is maybe more of a newsletter judging by the small office with one reporter/editor and one secretary/layout gal. Joan tries to go undercover as a magazine reporter but the newspaper guy knows she’s lying, is charmed by her and they almost immediately become snugly boyfriend and girlfriend.

Despite that failed operation he sends her on another one, going undercover as an alumni to the sorority to find out more about the murders, even though he personally reported on them at the time. She gets in by wearing a ring belonging to the secretary, who actually is an alumni so maybe she should’ve done it. I guess it didn’t occur to them.

But they let Joan stay at the sorority house, and the teenage girls hang out with her as if it’s not weird. You know how 18 year olds in sororities love to have sleepovers with 35 year old doctors from out of town that they just met. Other hobbies include dancing around, pulling up their shirts to show their bras, and talking about the murders. Joan sees Howard Johns in the boiler room but nobody believes her. Her and her new boyfriend want to protect the girls, but decide not to tell them about the escaped lunatic because they don’t want to scare them. Then when the power and phone lines are cut they agree that it’s “most likely a prank.”

If the girls had been warned maybe they would’ve seen him coming. In one of the better scenes Howard is able to sneak up and kill two in one room, one of them playing their Dragon’s Lair arcade game, the other hanging upside down on one of those aerobics hanging-upside-down things. Distracted by the the Twitters and iPhones of the day.

Meanwhile, the assholes at the hospital know they have a problem on their hands because of the short-sightedness of their “we’ll just lie and say that he’s dead and we cremated him” plan. It’s about as good as the one when I was a kid and I didn’t want to finish eating some kind of casserole thing my dad made so when he was out of the room I scooped it onto the table and put my plate on top of it. It achieved my goal in the short term but it eventually led to more problems. My ass would’ve appreciated it if I’d worked that out in advance.

So they send two orderlies to catch or kill Howard, but at least one of them is more interested in catching Joan and raping her. He has two different parts where he talks lustily about how much he’s gonna enjoy giving her a shot. When he finds her he yells that he’s gonna inject her “right up yer ass!” and turn her into a “piece of meat. Our meat!”

I thought this Boris Karloff guy on the VHS cover was cool until I saw the more accurate original movie poster above.

By coincidence Howard attacks her at the same time as these guys so it turns into a whoever wins we lose type situation, one bad guy pitted against the other. Howard ends up knocking Joan unconscious and tying her up. The disorderly later finds her that way, he oughta come to his senses and go after the murderer but instead he takes it as a lucky break, like finding a wad of cash on the ground. So he says “I got another report to put in your file.” You get it? His “report” in her “file.” He always wanted to say something clever like that before raping one of his co-workers that he found unconscious after being kidnapped by a serial killer.

Since this was filmed in New Jersey it has Paul DeAngelo, the musclebound counselor from SLEEPAWAY CAMP, as a dude camping with his girlfriend. He, his girl and his A-Team-esque van have no chance against Howard Johns and his sledge hammer.

The reason this is grade-W and not grade-Z is because there are maybe two ideas in it that seem intentionally good. One has to do with the way SPOILER flipping a breaker causes a giant drill to turn on and penetrate the orderly-rapist’s head. The other has to do with the SPOILER twist ending. When we first see the flashback to the massacre it makes no sense that the cruel prank that made him snap was a bunch of girls showing him their tits. But then at the end we find out that the flashback wasn’t entirely accurate, it was the mom that killed those girls with a nail gun. It was her that was upset about the tits, not him. That makes more sense.

This was director Simon Nuchtern’s next-to-last movie. The last one was SAVAGE DAWN.  Co-writer Bill Milling also wrote a bunch of porno movies under variations of the nom de plume “Dexter Eagle.” Nelson DeMille, who’s credited with “additional dialogue,” wrote the novel The General’s Daughter.

You know what, I just got it – Silent Madness because he’s mute. But Leatherface, Michael and Jason don’t talk either so that really doesn’t seem like the central gimmick here. Is there a central gimmick here? Maybe that’s the problem. Maybe I had to see it in 3D to really understand it.

One night Alice wakes up and hears power tools being used in the basement. She investigates and finds a dude (Wings “Ramrod” Hauser) still working on the house. He explains that he has a strong work ethic and won’t stop until the job’s not finished.

Over time Alice develops a friendship with this weird carpenter. With his corny inspirational slogans he’s probly full of shit, but he’s definitely more supportive than her husband, who turns out to be a sleazeball professor sleeping with one of his students. Because Alice is the only one that ever seems to see The Carpenter, and since it’s weird for him to be working in the middle of the night, and also since she has had some mental health problems in the recent past, you assume he’s probly a hallucination. But then the guys working on the house keep noticing the progress that he’s making and get pissed because they think their boss is bringing in “scabs” (a hypocritical thing to worry about when you’re a non-union guy working shittily for cheap).

And of course as people do bad things to Alice the Carpenter intervenes and uses his circular saw, drills, staple and nail guns on them. Because he’s The Carpenter. Although there are some goofy arm severings the emphasis of the movie is not really on these killings. It almost seems like they just put them in there and rushed through them because it was the ’80s and they knew people would expect that kind of stuff. Everything is surreal and ambiguous. After mutilating one guy he pins him against the wall to politely make room for the lady to pass by unobstructed by bloody dying mutilated victims. Nobody finds the bodies or seems to be looking for the missing people, although sometimes it is noticed that they’re gone.

In one of the more bizzare scenes a sheriff (Ron Lea) shows up at the house on a motorcycle. I believe this actor is trying to mega-act a little bit, but arguably without the skills to do it safely. He makes a huge show, revving his engine, chewing his gum, doing a funny two-handed knock on the door. He comes in and talks to her, never taking off his sunglasses, saying he’s just there to welcome her to the neighborhood. You assume he really knows something is up and will be back. Then you never see him again. He does provide some exposition though about a former owner of the house. We can now assume The Carpenter is some kind of ghost. Or the house makes its inhabitants go crazy. Or crazy people bring out the evil in the house. Or something.

By the end I believe we’re dealing with a movie where the protagonist is considering leaving her husband for a murderous ghost. I mean, that’s gotta hurt. But he’s a shitty husband, you can’t say he doesn’t deserve it at all.

There’s definitely some class tension here. One of the dumbasses working on the house has the hots for Alice because she’s “classy,” and he gets pissed off when she isn’t charmed by him showing up drunk at her house at night. This is a pretty insulting depiction of the working man as a beer-swilling, sexually aggressive moron who doesn’t even seem to understand the risk of hitting on the wife of the guy you work for. You know man, she would have good reasons to turn you down other than being stuck up.

Although the subject matter’s real different it kept reminding me of THE STEPFATHER, maybe because it’s so based in one suburban house location and in combining old fashioned American family values with evil and murder. But THE STEPFATHER is more clear in what it’s trying to say and more direct in being suspenseful and scary. The appeal of THE CARPENTER is more in unpredictability, because what the fuck is it up to? It’s usually hard to tell.

The director, David Wellington, later became a pretty prolific TV director, working on shows including The Kids in the Hall and the American version of Queer As Folk. The writer, Doug Taylor, later wrote IN THE NAME OF THE KING: A DUNGEON SIEGE TALE, THEY WAIT and SPLICE. He probly always regretted that the girl didn’t fuck the ghost, that’s why he was sure to have an Academy Award winning actor fuck his monster daughter in SPLICE.

This  has one of the best done opening scare scenes I’ve come across in a long time. A pretty young teacher’s assistant at a daycare sits on a merry-go-round with a little girl, holding a pinwheel, waiting for the last of the parents to pick up their kids. It’s dark and you get a strong feeling of the end of a long shift, outside in the city as the neighborhood is going from bustling work day to quiet night. She ends up sitting alone on this playground equipment, seeming to need some time to think about something, or just to let her mind go and enjoy the peace and solitude. And then, of course, an attacker hidden behind a motorcycle helmet approaches.

We find out that this motorcyclist/Daft Punk cosplayer is on a murder spree, using his ritualistic blade to decapitate women and leave their heads floating in water. Two of the victims attended the same women-only night school, which in my opinion is the main reason, perhaps even the only reason, why the movie is called NIGHT SCHOOL.

The movie does a pretty good job of leading your suspicions as you meet the various people around: a friend of the victim, an anthropology professor and other employees of the school, the various people who hang out and work at a nearby cafe. The female lead is the professor’s assistant, British exchange student Eleanor, played by Rachel Ward. One thing that’s kind of unintentionally funny is this guy Drew Snyder who plays the professor. He’s this smooth ladies man who multiple good looking young women have affairs with, and the waitress at the cafe talks about how dreamy he is. But I don’t know, this is what he looks like:

Not saying he’s ugly, but he sure doesn’t look like the pussy-magnet the movie portrays him as. I’m suspicious.

There are some gruesome sights in the movie, including a severed head dumped in a public aquarium and scaring an innocent old lady (I’d like to think the management gave her free passes to an Imax showing or something). More than that though the filmatists play with your dread about what somebody’s gonna find. The best example is when the manager of the cafe opens up the morning after a murder and it takes its sweet time letting us know where he’s gonna find the head while trying to whip together breakfast for a couple of his construction worker regulars.

That’s what this movie has that lesser horror movies are lacking: suspense chops. I figured out what was going on pretty early and the explanation is novel but not mindblowing. But it didn’t really matter because the sequences where people get chased or stalked or where they find the bodies are done by pros. They really play on the fears of women (or people in general) alone at night: thinking somebody’s following you on the street, thinking you hear a sound in your apartment, not hearing the sound in the apartment when there actually is one. As poor Eleanor tries to walk faster and faster down the street you wonder why anybody would think it was a good idea to wear high heels. Geez. Not convenient.

While HALLOWEEN was one of the first couple movies from a promising young director, NIGHT SCHOOL was the last by a Hollywood veteran. Kenneth Hughes started directing in ‘52. Some of his more famous works include OF HUMAN BONDAGE with Kim Novak, CHITTY CHITTY BANG BANG, CROMWELL and THE INTERNECINE PROJECT. He didn’t die until 2001, so maybe he figured he wanted to end on this one, I don’t know.

I never heard of this one before renting it, and looking it up it doesn’t seem to have too good of a reputation, the main complaint apparently being that it allegedly doesn’t have enough gore. (Gore is like salt, it’s always too much for somebody and not enough for somebody else. You guys just gotta stop being so finicky.) But I thought it was real solid. It’s no VISITING HOURS but it’s easily one of the best I’ve stumbled on so far in these slasher searches.

(but now available on DVD from Warner Archive)

Then it skips to years later but instead of Halloween day it’s Thanksgiving, a totally different holiday almost a full month after Halloween. And instead of his doctor looking for him for the whole movie she gets killed right away and everybody else is looking for her.

The main story begins at Thanksgiving dinner, where the mother Maddy (Louise Lasser, Mary Hartman from Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman) is welcoming guests including Terry (Mark Soper), who is the killer twin but who she thinks is innocent, when she gets a call from the asylum (or “school” as she calls it) that Todd (also Mark Soper), who is the innocent twin but who she thinks is a killer, has gone missing.

“Well, it looks like you’re gonna get a chance to meet the rest of the family,” Terry announces to the guests dickishly. “My psychotic brother just escaped. ”

So just like Michael Myers is on the loose and headed home for the holidays, so is Todd. But he’s actually not gonna kill anybody. The danger in this one is that him being out has inspired Terry to go on a killing spree, knowing he can blame it on his brother again. He’s not scary-looking like Michael though, he’s just a regular dude in an ugly black and white striped Nike shirt.

Soper does play the brothers differently so you can tell them apart. Terry’s brand of psychotic is the condescending smartass type, kind of a toned down version of the killer from SILENT NIGHT, DEADLY NIGHT 2. There are two different scenes where he sees blood and says “It’s not cranberry sauce!” As Todd he’s a timid, haunted guy that freaks everybody out and makes Terry’s girlfriend think he’s high.

I don’t mind this one taking such obvious inspiration from HALLOWEEN, in fact I kind of like that. But it really reminds you how great HALLOWEEN is, you can’t just take some of the elements and re-create it. In particular the camera work and the music here are not as well-executed as in Carpenter’s classic. It’s just not the same. You gotta know what you’re doing.

Since it’s pretty crappy I appreciate that the filmatist made the effort (or the obvious choice) to be gorier than the movie that inspired it. You’re sure as shit not gonna be scared by this stuff, so at least you get some fun FRIDAY THE 13TH type gags for chuckles. There’s a good body-cut-in-half-with-both-halves-moving scene. There’s a dead body that’s sitting upright and when it gets nudged it not only falls over, its head splits open revealing its brains. There’s a part where a girl sees her boyfriend outside through the peephole, then opens the door to find out it’s just his severed head hanging from a hook. (This one is kind of ruined by the movie not actually showing the view through the peephole.) And a hand that gets cut off and wiggles around while still holding onto a can of beer. That kind of stuff.

I think when they signed on Lasser they thought they had to get her in there as much as possible to show they had a real star in the movie. Most of her scenes seem like stuff that would’ve been deleted in most movies. Once she finds out her son has escaped she spends most of the movie alone in her apartment eating Thanksgiving food, then drinking wine, then on the phone for a long time trying to get through to the hospital. It keeps cutting back to her as if it’s important for us to see all this stuff. Even with that padding the running time is under 70 minutes. Not that I’m complaining. It seems like the right length.

IMDb lists this as a 1987 film, but the trivia says it was filmed in ‘83, which I believe because that’s the copyright date on the VHS label. If so that makes it Ted Raimi’s first film other than THE EVIL DEAD (he has a bit part as a guy selling a wide variety of condoms in the restroom at the drive-in. So he banks on dudes at the drive-in being unprepared but not entirely irresponsible).

Two-time director John Grissmer’s previous film was FALSE FACE, aka SCALPEL, in ‘77. He produced and wrote a ‘73 picture called THE HOUSE THAT CRIED MURDER, which is the movie playing in the drive-in at the beginning (and on the TV later?) Writer Bruce Rubin wrote ZAPPED! and one episode of the cartoon RECESS. He also made his mark by causing the writer of GHOST and JACOB’S LADDER to have to go by Bruce Joel Rubin.

The prologue to the movie sets the whole thing off on such bizarre and illogical footing that most of the movie is able to glide on the momentum from it. This is a stupid and amateurish movie and I’m really not sure what the hell they were going for, and that’s why it stays compelling through to the end.

An almost sarcastically happy girl in a puffy pink dress with a giant bow on the back carries her dolly down a muddy road to play tea party in a little shack that looks like an outhouse. Suddenly she hears a motorcycle pulling up, so she climbs out a hole and watches inside as a tough guy in a leather jacket pins his girlfriend down and starts roughly squeezing her boobs. When she tells him to stop he gets so mad he pulls the girl’s dolly’s head off and hits his girlfriend with it. (Seems like the doll would be a better weapon if it was kept intact, but who knows how these abusers think.)

Well, after the doll-head beating he gives up and they get back on the motorcycle, head down the road, turn back around and pass the shack again. The little girl has now shoveled a bunch of mud into a bucket which she throws into the biker’s face – causing him to crash, causing the two to go flying into the air, and they are both impaled on some big metal spikes that are sticking out of the ground for some reason and that were not shown before but isn’t that really how this sort of accident happens, you don’t notice the big metal spike until it’s too late.

18 years later of course that little girl (still living next to the muddy field they call a swamp) is Brooke Storm (Maureen Mooney), the uptight teacher. One of her students, Jon-Jon (Christopher Cousins), has just been kicked off the football team for cowardice (?) and is being picked on by the coach (J.R. Horne) and the other jocks. But he finds a new group of friends in Queenie (Millie Prezioso) and Smiler (Jason Brill) when their leader and master of mean pranks Dickens (Christopher Stryker) calls the football player gay and tells Jon-Jon they should be friends now because they all hate football. So naturally they make plans to hang out and go to the football game.

Smiler just giggles and throws popcorn at people, Dickens wanders out onto the field and pulls a knife on an injured player before he gets put into the ambulance. It seems like they’re genuinely interested in the game, though, until they spontaneously decide to drive out onto the field in Dickens’s convertible. Nobody seems too shocked about it until the moment that Jon-Jon intercepts the ball.

(In one of the few really natural bits of acting in the movie there’s a shot of some players on the other team laughing about what just happened, instead of the standard issue shock and outrage at the System being turned on its head or whatever.)

Then they all go out to the teacher’s house, watch her clean her boobs in the shower, and hatch a Scooby-Doo style plan to scare her. Since these kids just fuck around in class and don’t do anything they’ve grown into 25-year-old-looking mush-headed idiots. So when they decide they need swamp slime for their prank the three of them actually go out and use their bare hands to scoop green sludge one handful at a time into big garbage bags. Even the little girl in the prologue knew how to shovel mud into a bucket. This is just sad.

Dickens is clearly the biggest troublemaker out of these guys. He’s the one that got in Ms. Storm’s face in class and got slapped. He’s the one who openly drinks Jack Daniels in front of the school and while driving. And not in the small bottle either, the bigger one. He’s the one that pulled a huge knife on that football player for no reason. So he’s also the one that goes into the house by himself and find the teacher in bed not able to fight back because her friend gave her Quaaludes to calm her down. Meanwhile Smiler, waiting outside in the car, smiles and says “No telling what that Dickens is up to!” You gotta love that little scamp, always stirring up a ruckus, raping, etc.

So we’re left thinking oh no, who’s going to stop Dickens from doing what he’s up to? Looks like it’ll have to be Queenie. She comes in and sees what’s going on. She’s been fed up with all the Dickensian crap lately, and plus she’s a girl. So she starts chewing him out, telling him to stop.

But wait! She wants him to stop so she can “show him how it’s done”! She climbs on Ms. Storm and starts fondling her boobs in a more gentle, loving but not consensual manner.

Finally Jon-Jon shows up, and he tries to intervene. He doesn’t want to take over either, he actually wants to stop the assault. Not necessarily because he’s against raping, but because, as he explains, this is a crime that could have real jail time and they have to worry about their “future.” But of course, guys like Dickens don’t really care too much about the future, so that’s not a strong debate tactic against him.

To me HELL HIGH doesn’t come across as intentionally comedic (except maybe when the character who asked in class why it’s important to use a #2 pencil much later gets stabbed in the head with one), and certainly is not gonna scare anybody. But it is fun as the kind of crappy horror movie you can laugh at a little. And it has a couple gory parts if you’re into that. The head-bashing scene I thought was disturbingly realistic, although probly just done with a foam rock.

What makes the movie worthwhile is all the weird little touches that I can’t explain.

The parts I liked best/was most confused by:

*the coach, after bringing Ms. Storm home from the football came, stops and makes a speech to himself on the porch about how the kids let him down because he would’ve gotten laid if they didn’t suck so bad

*Jon-Jon, when he first sees Queenie’s house, for some reason mutters to himself “America.”

*Smiler, after they’ve assaulted their teacher and caused her to flip out and everything has gone to shit, laments “My mother told me there’d be days like this.” Dickens, meanwhile, lays on a bunk bed staring at the ceiling and cuddling Ms. Storm’s Raggedy Ann doll.

*Dickens always wears a jacket that says “RAIDERS” on the back. This is clearly not the ubiquitous black pirate-themed Oakland Raiders jacket familiar in the ’80s and in early gangster rap. I checked and there are some old Raiders jackets that don’t have the logo on them, but I don’t think there were ever maroon ones. What is it supposed to mean? Is it the name of his one-man gang? Is it unlicensed NFL merchandise? I don’t know.

*Toward the end of the movie there’s a pretty impressive motorcycle stunt and explosion. But even after rewinding and watching it again I couldn’t figure out who these people were or why Jon-Jon ran them off the road, possibly killing them.

The DVD has plenty of extras including director commentary, Joe Bob Briggs commentary and interviews with the director and writer, but luckily the movie still remains a mystery to me. The director seems like a normal guy, not a weirdo, except when talking about his delight in the head-bashing scene because he’d been dating the actress and then broke up with her. But the way these guys talk about the movie I still can’t figure out what they were going for. They mention BLUE VELVET and PHANTOM OF THE PARADISE, two movies I definitely don’t notice having any connections to this. They talk about how their big idea was to combine the horror movies that were popular at the time with teen movies, but of course the horror movies that were popular at the time were teen movies. They talk about going to a midnight screening where the audience “got it,” which makes me wonder what there is to get because I must not’ve got it.

Pretty enjoyable though.

I take recommendations and everything but my favorite part is digging up these random ones that are so obscure I can only find them on VHS. I mean I haven’t had much success with this method, but I enjoy the hunt, you know? The idea that eventually I could find the holy grail, the lost ark, the crystal skull or the tasty monkey brains. Or at least the stone or the jewel of the Nile or something.

There's no Grim Reaper costume in the movie, this is just the poetry of movie poster art

This one is not a treasure but it’s at least watchable, so I consider it a victory. A group of upper class New Yorkers go stay at a cabin upstate where their friend has a boat being built. You know, one of those boat-being-built outings we all enjoy. William Sanderson (from Newhart and BLADE RUNNER) plays Otis, a creepy redneck that’s working on the boat and who keeps spying on everybody with binoculars. We see him apparently stalking the main lady in a dreamy opening flashforward, and we hear a story about him catching his wife with another man. Supposedly he murdered the man and branded his wife with a letter ‘H.’ That would be fucked up if he was marking her as his property with his last initial or something, but it’s even worse: it’s supposed to mean “whore.” (They fuck up the punchline by explaining it in case the audience doesn’t know how to spell either).

There’s alot of shit going on, mostly involving various characters getting naked and making out on picnic blankets. It seems like the movie’s almost over by the time somebody puts on a Halloween mask and starts murdering everybody. The mask kind of looks like a drug store Michael Meyers knockoff but depicting an exposed skull on one side. But according to IMDb trivia it was filmed in ‘76, so it had to have been a coincidence.

Or shit, maybe not! Both movies have the same cinematographer, Dean Cundey. Conspiracy! Well, he did a better job on HALLOWEEN.

If there’s a most interesting character it must be the gay guy. He’s kind of a Rupert Everett type, a really sarcastic and arrogant dude that brags about how much sex he gets and acts above everyone and everything. In one scene he goes into a redneck bar and orders some kind of fancy martini, as if unaware that this is not the type of place to do that. It’s like that little joke I love in ART SCHOOL CONFIDENTIAL where a girl insists on walking around barefoot even though the school is in the middle of a city and she steps right onto some broken glass. This is how I want to live my life and I don’t care what you think.

It’s not the worst gay stereotype to promote, but it was not endearing me to this character. Then two dudes at the bar start giving him shit about being gay (even though one of them’s wearing a sailor hat!). He beats the shit out of them and declares “I wasn’t brought up in the South Bronx for nothin!” A gay guy who can handle himself in a fight is not a movie character you see alot, especially in a low rent slasher like this. I give it points for that.

Toward the climax of the movie there’s a long sequence where one of the girls puts on a record and starts doing sort of a seductive burlesque performance for him, stripping down to garters and high heels, doing a sexy fan dance on the stairs, leading him around the house, then she puts makeup on him. It’s actually kind of interesting because it’s not explained exactly what they’re thinking. Is she seriously trying to seduce him? Is she thinking it would be the ultimate notch on her belt to bag a gay dude? Or is she just joking around with him, because she figures he’ll appreciate that kind of girly glamour stuff?

And what about him? He stands and watches. He smiles. He’s obviously intrigued. But is he seriously considering hitting that? Or is he just fascinated to see how far she’s gonna go? She goes into the other room and he looks at himself in the mirror. Is he just checking out the makeup? Is he thinking “Am I gonna hit that? Who am I?” Does he want to do it out of curiosity but have to psyche himself up?

We never find out because there’s a masked killer in the house. To the movie’s credit they don’t have her think the masked man is him and say “Oh come on, quit joking around, take that off!” And it’s the only slasher movie I can think of where somebody gets killed by a large pin.

There’s actually a way weirder seduction scene though. The main lady is very confused. She’s still haunted by her first husband, who got messed up in the head after the politician he worked with committed suicide. She’s got a new husband with her here. But she clearly wants to fuck Otis’s boss, the dude with the Hulk Hogan mustache. When she goes to talk to him she starts absent-mindedly caressing construction equipment like it’s a giant cock. Later she visits him in a barn and starts gently running her hand across a god damn cow! He’s going to get her some eggs and she gets down on her knees and starts fondling the cow’s udder. I’m not exaggerating to make this sound weirder. He comes over and helps her suggestively milk the cow into his hand, tries to get her to drink it. She doesn’t so he sips it himself. But in case you’re thinking he doesn’t get the double-meaning here he wipes the remaining milk across her thighs.

Yeah, basically they jerk off a cow together.

So there’s plenty of interest here, it’s just too bad it’s not creepy at all. The transfer on the pan and scan VHS isn’t helping either – it was obviously supposed to be cropped, so there are tons of scenes with visible boom mics. The ending is kinda good too, there’s sort of a clever way that it all comes together with the killer and a couple of the red herrings getting into a big fight. And for once there’s a class reversal in a slasher film, it’s not the uneducated redneck behind the mask. Also “Yancy Victoria Butler,” aka WITCHBLADE herself, appears as the mustache guy’s daughter, credited as “Little Girl.” So that would be the movie’s place in history I guess, that or it being Dean Cundey’s rehearsal for HALLOWEEN. But yeah, the cow handjob would have to be the most notable part in my opinion.

One of the actors, Christopher Allport (the gay guy?) was killed in an avalanche in 2008. Another one, David Gale, had his life made into a movie starring Kevin Spacey. Nah, just fuckin with you, that was most likely some other guy with the same name. This David Gale played the bad guy in REANIMATOR, though.

Director David Paulsen debuted with this, followed it the next year with SCHIZOID starring Klaus Kinski, and then just did episodes of Knot’s Landing, Dallas and Dynasty, where his fascination with empty marriages, forbidden attraction and risky seduction was more at home.

We all remember that, but I thought it would be interesting to look up the specifics. According to my research there were only six other scary movie thrillers released theatrically that year: CANDYMAN: FAREWELL TO THE FLESH, THE DENTIST, THE FRIGHTENERS, FROM DUSK TILL DAWN, HELLRAISER: BLOODLINE* and THINNER. DTV releases included TREMORS 2: AFTERSHOCKS, CARNOSAUR 3: PRIMAL SPECIES and CHILDREN OF THE CORN IV: THE GATHERING.

Compare that to now. It’s only April, and we’ve already tied those six if you include the touring RED STATE along with THE RITE, THE ROOMMATE, DRIVE ANGRY 3D, RED RIDING HOOD and INSIDIOUS. I count another ten coming in the rest of the year, not even including TWILIGHT. For last year I count 19 horror releases (8 original, 5 sequels, 6 remakes – see Appendix A for details). The difference in quality is debatable, but clearly there’s more of a market than there was back then. And this has been going on pretty much since SCREAM, because of SCREAM.

But it’s been 11 years since SCREAM 3, and that was supposed to be the end of a trilogy, so why another one now? Well, alot of things have changed. SCREAM 4 attempts to bring the story up-to-date on technology (all the kids have smart phones, text messaging, Facebook and Twitter, although there are a surprising number of land lines used), horror trends (they talk about remakes, reboots, “torture porn,” found footage movies [sort of] and even the postmodernism fatigue of SCREAM sequels). A couple of the death scenes are gorier, which has its place in the endless horror cycle: it’s a response to today’s hard-R horror, which began as a backlash against yesterday’s bloodless PG-13 horror, which came from the wave of THE RING type Asian remake ghost movies that rode in on the back of the young female horror audience built by SCREAM and its teen-oriented knockoffs. So it’s all connected.

The biggest change in horror during this period is of course the emphasis on remaking every god damn thing. Almost every “scary movie” referenced in the first SCREAM has since been remade: PSYCHO, TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE, BLACK CHRISTMAS, I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE, HALLOWEEN, WHEN A STRANGER CALLS, THE FOG, FRIDAY THE 13TH, PROM NIGHT, A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET. What’s that leave – THE HOWLING, THE TOWN THAT DREADED SUNDOWN and TERROR TRAIN? Three of Craven’s own movies have been remade. So of course in part 4 a new series of murders happens in Woodsboro and our heroes (Neve Campbell, Courteney Cox and David Arquette all return) consider it a “remake” of the movie-within-a-movie version of SCREAM, Robert Rodriguez’s STAB. There are scenes in this movie where characters try to deconstruct a movie scene about characters deconstructing a movie scene in a sequel to a movie-within-a-movie based on a book-within-a-movie based on the events of the first movie. You know.

Yeah, it’s convoluted, but that’s the joke. But not that great of a joke.

Before I pick apart what I think is wrong with SCREAM 4 I gotta say that I enjoyed watching it okay. Other people have accurately criticized its awkward movie-deconstructing dialogue and its people wanting to watch horror movies shortly after someone close to them was murdered in a manner inspired by horror movies. It seems like references are more important to the filmatists than believable emotions. I agree with these complaints but I also feel like those are par for the course in a SCREAM movie, that’s sort of the world that’s been established. So even though it would’ve been nice if they improved it I didn’t have trouble getting past it.

And I look at it in the context of Craven’s filmography. Compared to SCREAM 3 this one wasn’t disappointing, there was nobody causing a gas explosion by using a lighter to see in the dark, no Jay and Silent Bob cameo, no lame casting in-jokes. Compared to CURSED it feels remarkably well-crafted and entertaining, almost as if it had a completed script before shooting (although it didn’t). Compared to MY SOUL TO TAKE it seems sane and competently made (although that one was so fucked I enjoyed it).

I felt like kind of a chump going to see this because I knew that they knew that I would want to see a part 4 even though I figured it would suck. The real victims of horror are not the people who say “I’ll be right back,” they’re the people who love horror movies and can’t restrain their curiosity about every sequel or remake they spawn. We’re like fish who eat the worms even when we see the hooks poking out.

With all that in mind SCREAM 4 was way better than I thought it would be. It was surprisingly okay. In my opinion the movie kind of works on the unambitious level of “hey, I remember these characters” and “hey, I remember what these SCREAM sequels were like.” I was pretty much expecting a CURSED type disaster ever since I read that the Weinsteins forced Craven to shoot rewrites that he had no say in, and scripted by Ehren Krueger, who you’d think would not be allowed near it after blowing part 3 so badly.

But on the level of “this completely justifies going back to the well again” it’s not a success at all. It’s admirable that they brought the original leads back and they’re still the leads, they don’t do a cheap and predictable stunt like killing off Jamie Lee Curtis in the opening of the last and worst HALLOWEEN movie. But they don’t give them much to work with.

Take Neve Campbell’s Final Girl Sidney Prescott, for example. She returns to Woodsboro because she wrote a book about surviving the murders, and she’s doing a signing on the anniversary of the murders. Not only did they already have Courteney Cox become a famous author for writing about the murders in a previous sequel, but this is the exact same scenario used for Dr. Loomis in HALLOWEEN REMAKE 2.

Sidney knows a few fight moves when she gets attacked. She doesn’t get upset much anymore and doesn’t seem at all bothered by the poor taste of kids celebrating the anniversary of the murders of her family and friends. I kind of like that, because we’ve seen the traumatized victim before, it’s been done pretty well, here’s something new. She’s changed, but I’d like to see her changed more. She doesn’t get to do enough. I’d like to see her really chase down this new Ghostface and fuck him up. If she’s a new Sidney she should be a really new Sidney. In fact we know nothing about her life other than that she wrote a book and doesn’t live in Woodsboro. Did she go to college? Does she have a boyfriend? Friends? Does she enjoy antiques or paragliding? Is she a person?

(And I can’t remember if they mentioned this in the other sequels, but shouldn’t Sid be packing by now? That would make for an interesting change in the formula if the first time a Ghostface attacks her she pulls out a gun and clips him.)

Since the movie spends alot of time reuniting the old characters the new set of young people don’t get as developed as the kids in part 1, and they don’t get as many funny lines. But I did like Hayden Panettiere’s character, a girl who likes horror movies but isn’t even portrayed as weird, goth, or nerdy. That’s almost progressive as far as gender roles in a SCREAM movie. On the other hand she doesn’t get to demonstrate much of her alleged horror trivia skills (see Appendix B for rant), and the one movie we see her watching is SHAUN OF THE DEAD. It might be more of an envelope push if she was really into GUINEA PIG or DR. BUTCHER M.D. or some shit.

Now that I think about it she must’ve been designed to throw off the Final Girl formula. She has a boyish hairdo and the androgynous name Kirby, but she likes to party and drink. She wears a suit-type jacket, but opened to show cleavage. Is she gonna survive or die? I don’t know what to do!

At any rate she definitely comes off better than the two male horror nerd characters, one a Culkin, one wearing a camera on his head to livestream and narrate his whole life. And I believe he uses the word “cyberspace.” I detect the scent of old people trying too hard to show they understand young people. At least they didn’t put in any references to that “Snooky” person.

There’s a whole bunch of pretty young ladies in this cast, and the older I get the more I think the adults playing kids really do look like kids. I believe Eric Roberts’s daughter plays Neve Campbell’s cousin. This might be a who’s who of young TV and movie stars, but I’m not sure, because I don’t know who’s who. But you know who I’m proud of? Anthony Anderson. Not just ’cause he lost weight. After so many years of playing “funny scaredy fat guy” I think it’s kind of awesome that he can just play a serious, stoic cop in this one. I mean it’s not much of a role, and being in SCREAM 4 is a step down from being in THE DEPARTED or HUSTLE AND FLOW, and I don’t really get the one big line he has. But still, good for him.

I won’t give away who the killer(s) is or are. It’s not a great solution to the mystery, but makes for a decent ending. One of the few times where I felt the authentic exhilaration of seeing a good horror movie was during a sequence near the end where they abandon the template of the other three movies and I finally felt like I didn’t know which way it would go. And one member of the cast gets to become a more memorable character at that point.

There’s a little bit of lecturing going on here, but not real sharp. It gets a little blatant in talking about The Kids These Days, but is neither saying anything original or getting as mean about it as it could. They’re trying to appeal to multiple generations of horror fans, but maybe it would work if it was more of a generational war. Like these young people now are a whole different breed that our old heroes have to learn to understand.

You know why they can’t do that? ‘Cause maybe the details are different, maybe they use different machines to do it, but the allegedly of-the-moment phenomenon they’re trying to satirize here really isn’t much different from the shit going on in our culture since years before the first SCREAM came out anyway. If it is something new I think they need to cut deeper to convince me of that.

That’s the problem, it’s alot of loose ideas with no meat underneath. Just ’cause you mention a bunch of modern shit doesn’t mean you’re saying something about it. I think part 4 would be more justified if the commentary on modern horror was more than just surface. It should be more than just a character saying the SAW movies suck, or mentioning FINAL DESTINATION, or pointing out that newer horror doesn’t follow the same rules about who can die as they supposedly followed in the old days. They say these murders are a remake, but it’s not all that different from the murders that were a sequel. They kind of hint at and then dismiss the idea of remaking or “rebooting” SCREAM. But this never feels like anything other than another SCREAM movie. Maybe there would be more drama, more meta-danger, if it really threatened to become one of those things.

I’m not even asking for anything deep here, just attention to detail. This looks like the other SCREAM movies, except maybe a little shoddier. It doesn’t look like 2011 horror. I think they should’ve shot it like a Platinum Dunes movie. Lots of gold tinting, pretty sunsets, shiny sweaty people in cut-off jeans. There should be atmosphere. In fact they could get around the we’ve-seen-the-mask-too-much problem by having the remake killers redesign the mask, just like they would in a real remake. I guess they can’t make Ghostface 8 feet tall with rock star hair without introducing some pretty ridiculous red herrings (Wrestlemania’s in town?), but still. Commenting on remakes and reboots would’ve been a perfect excuse to shake things up a little. And it worked in NEW NIGHTMARE.

Or at least shoot it in a different way. Use the same mask but give us some new cinematographical trickery so we look at it differently. A more artful look.

Or a shittier one. There’s an idea in this one that the killer or killers are filming the murders – I guess this is supposed to address today’s technologically-fed self-obsession, and reality TV and documentaries and also these BLAIR WI– well, actually that’s almost as old as SCREAM, so PARANORMAL ACTIVITY type movies. But if they’re going to go there, maybe they should show us a good chunk of the video? I mean, I hate that type of shit, but it would be a new take on SCREAM if it started with finding a video, something like a POV version of the opening of the first movie. Give us something, fellas.

At one dramatic point in SCREAM 4 a character gets to say a one-liner that is also a dis of remakes. When I saw the movie the crowd applauded at that part. It’s a satisfying moment but then you kinda think okay, yeah, fuck remakes, but what about part 4s that nobody asked for? In a part 4 worth doing I wouldn’t have thought about that.

So the bottom line is it’s more watchable than expected, but they shouldn’t have made it. It’s better than part 3 but not good enough for a new ending or especially a new beginning.

Oh shit, you know what? I don’t think they mentioned prequels at all. Maybe they’re saving that for part 0, THE RISE OF GHOSTFACE.

*Coincidentally HELLRAISER: BLOODLINE was another part 4 that was completely screwed over by the Weinsteins when they decided after the movie was almost done filming that they didn’t like the script and the whole thing should be rewritten and re-edited. From what I remember it turned out worse than SCREAM 4, although more ambitious since it took place in different time periods and even went into space. Shit, maybe I’ll watch that one again. Anyway, some things never change…
————–

APPENDIX A: Horror movies released theatrically in 2010

original: DAYBREAKERS, FROZEN, AFTER.LIFE, THE HUMAN CENTIPEDE, SPLICE, THE LAST EXORCISM, DEVIL, MY SOUL TO TAKE,
sequel: SURVIVAL OF THE DEAD, REC 2, RESIDENT EVIL: AFTERLIFE, PARANORMAL ACTIVITY 2, SAW 3D
remake: THE WOLFMAN, THE CRAZIES, A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET, PIRANHA 3D, LET ME IN, I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE

(note: I excluded many movies that could arguably be classified as horror, including BLACK SWAN and PREDATORS.)

APPENDIX B: A deleted rant about weak trivia questions

Ah fuck it, I said I wasn’t gonna, but I need to rant a little bit about the use of horror trivia in these movies. The SCREAM killers make harassing calls where they sometimes quiz their victims about horror movies. The questions have always been beginner level, but I feel like it could’ve been upped a little bit for this one. After all we now live in this post-SCREAM world where horror movies are very popular, where Kirby the girl horror fan is normal, where an Academy Award winning movie already namedropped Dario Argento, where every child has access to the IMDb in his or her pocket. Even if they’re not serious horror fans they’re gonna know more than what these killers expect them to know.

But the SCREAM movies are not really aimed at serious horror fans. The trivia is like those Coca-Cola slides they used to have in theaters, they think everybody would feel good if they got it right so they make it real hard for somebody to not know the answer. They fucking ask what weapon Freddy Krueger uses! And Leatherface! I think we, as a society, are ready for harder questions. In fact it could even be a plot point that he catches them looking up answers on their phones.

I’m sure it wouldn’t be vastly improved by having a slightly more intermediate question like “the director of THE LAST STARFIGHTER and THE BOY WHO COULD FLY also played which iconic horror character?” But the use of for-babies-only questions in the movie shows that either

a) they’re aimed primarily at people only vaguely familiar with horror movies
b) the horror nerds in the movies are supposed to be less knowledgeable than they believe they are
c) the writers are less knowledgeable than they believe they are

I’m guessing it’s either a or c. Neither is really an indictment of the movies, but it does hold them back a little for serious horror fans like me and you. When SCREAM came out it was sort of a novelty to have the characters in a slasher movie recognize the tropes the same way the audience does, and use that recognition to try to save themselves. And there’s always one or more character that’s supposed to have watched alot of the movies and knows “the rules” of how they work.

I think Kevin Williamson is a guy who’s enjoyed a bunch of horror movies, but no more than that. He doesn’t have a Tarantino-level encyclopedic brain or a strong sense of analysis. He just digs on TERROR TRAIN and shit. So his characters are increasingly stretching it when it comes to these so-called rules.

Or in this case the trivia. In this one the scary phone voice asks which movie started the slasher craze – HALLOWEEN, LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT or PSYCHO. Then it claims the correct answer is PEEPING TOM (and like all nerds in movies and no nerds in real life he then mentions the director and year as a victory lap).

Nice try Ghostface but I gotta appeal to the judges on this one. PEEPING TOM is an excellent movie with some similarities to PSYCHO, and it was released first, but you cannot back up the claim that it started a “slasher craze.” When it was released PEEPING TOM was not a hit, was so hated by critics it pretty much ended Michael Powell’s career, and was overshadowed by the success of PSYCHO anyway. Meanwhile PSYCHO inspired some knockoffs like William Castle’s HOMICIDAL, but there was hardly a “slasher craze” until the ’70s.

Furthermore, using a multiple choice format for a question and not including the correct answer is for weiners, especially when the answer is subjective and two of the offered choices make more sense than your alleged correct answer. LAST HOUSE was of course earlier than HALLOWEEN and was influential at least in the area of titling and taglines. But I would go with HALLOWEEN since it became the most profitable independent movie of all time and was the specific inspiration for a whole slew of holiday slashers and masked killers. That’s what started a “slasher craze.” You think the makers of SILENT NIGHT, DEADLY NIGHT saw PEEPING TOM? I bet they didn’t.

So what’s your favorite scary movie, motherfucker? I bet it’s SHAUN OF THE DEAD.

Holy shit, what if Ghostface called Watson, the computer that beat humans on Jeopardy? That would be interesting.

Anyway, despite questionable quizmastering and all, my feeling on Kevin Williamson is that he’s a guy who loves horror movies and came up with a cool gimmick of how to pay tribute to them and he executed that gimmick well. But if it’s possible to take that concept to the next level in a sequel – and I’m not sure it is – he’s not the guy with the mind or the skills to pull it off. (He got closer than Ehren Krueger, though.)

MY SOUL TO TAKE looks like a pretty typical glossy teen horror movie, with characters that could be in FREDDY VS. JASON or a FINAL DESTINATION, plus your standard Marco Beltrami score infused with an occasional rock song. Although it’s not a remake, a sequel, a prequel or a prequmake it does fit your modern mainstream horror mold by being released in last-minute-post-production-3D (LMPP3).

Yeah, it looks normal from a distance, but when you get up close it’s clear that something’s off here. Most movies that look like this follow a fairly simple formula. In the first half hour or less you figure out generally where the story is going and it either plays out elegantly or clumsily and that determines whether it works or not. But I rarely knew where the fuck MY SOUL TO TAKE was going, or what it was supposed to be about. The story is so convoluted and the combination of elements and incidents is so effortlessly odd that it just feels completely unhinged and keeps me off balance. It’s nowhere near the same level of quality, but it made me think a little bit of FEMME FATALE and RAISING CAIN in the way it crazily connects so many different types of stories, like mixing up the pieces of five different puzzles and forcing them to fit together.

Actually, I got a better comparison. It’s like a calmer version of I KNOW WHO KILLED ME. Not as bonkers as that one, but weird enough that you’re not sure if it’s kind of clever or if it just has parts that work by accident. For example, the first present-day kill (which I noticed afterwards is spoiled on the disc menu, as well as in this review) happens at exactly the place in the movie and in exactly the manner that horror movies usually have a fake scare.

Hey, who is that menacing silhouette coming toward me on a foggy night? Oh shit, it’s the killer! He’s coming at me! (BOO!) What the– is that a mask? Oh, it’s my buddy playing a tasteless joke. (Ha ha ha, I got you.) You asshole, that’s not funny! etc.

So I’m watching this scene in MY SOUL TO TAKE ready for the unmasking, but it turns out it really is the real killer already. The kid just gets quickly stabbed and unceremoniously tossed off a bridge. Is that a fakeout fakeout? Or did they not expect that I would expect a fakeout? Is it knowingly confounding my expectations, or is it succeeding by doing everything wrong? I thought maybe Craven would settle that question on the commentary track, but he has a couple of these young actors with him, so it’s one of those “co-workers reminiscing about the good times they had” tracks. He doesn’t go into deconstructionist college professor mode like he sometimes can.

It helps that the few trailers I saw didn’t really explain what the movie was about, exactly. But I guess the movie itself doesn’t do a very clear job of that either. What I’m trying to say is that this review might ruin it for you, it was nice to go in having no clue what was about to unfold. (I’ve noticed I spend alot of time writing about why you guys shouldn’t be reading what I’m writing. Also, would you believe that I’m just now getting to the part where I try to describe the plot.)

We open 16 years ago. The people of Riverton, Massachusetts are presumably aglow in FORREST GUMP mania, enjoying the Winter Olympics live from Lillehammer, Norway, or having their minds blown by the instant classic debut albums of Wu-Tang Clan, Snoop Doggy Dogg and Notorious B.I.G. These things are not mentioned though. Instead a video of a recent serial killer attack is showing on the local news, where they can’t make out the killer’s face but have enhanced the footage to show that he used a knife that says “Vengeance” on it (this has no apparent meaning in the story, so it’s probly just a promo item from the Johnnie To movie). Meanwhile a lady is pregnant and a CGI baby hand imprint pushes out of her belly (I think it’s supposed to be cute, not creepy). The father is building a dollhouse, then starts flipping out between multiple personalities and realizes that one of his personalities is the owner of that famous knife. Before you know it there are gunfights, near death experiences, a rash of premature births, distorted Freddy Krueger type voices, an exploding ambulance and a paramedic explaining that perhaps each of the killer’s multiple personalities is a separate soul.

Then we skip to the present, when the seven teenage preemies (now known as the Riverton Seven) and their school chums are at the site of the candle-decorated charred ambulance wreckage to celebrate their sweet sixteens by having a jock guy make a big speech about the urban legend of the Riverton Ripper before they perform a ritual where one of them leads a giant puppet into the river to scare away the ghost. The guy who has to do it is named Bug (Max Thieriot). He is the protagonist of the movie and is scared of the puppet. Also he has a best friend named Dunkelman (John Magaro), a nerdy guy who teaches him how to be a man.

Bug is supposed to be very troubled. There are hints about his mysterious hidden past, his migraines, even claims that he has murdered people before (claims he questions as if open to the possibility). For most of the movie he wears a t-shirt depicting the life cycle of frogs. And he stays up past 2 am listening to a talk radio show about birds called “The Birding Hour,” building a giant California condor puppet that represents some kind of mythological such-and-such about the transference of souls, and also pukes and shits on a bully in class.

At some point we unexpectedly shift into a stylized high school world like HEATHERS or MEAN GIRLS. The popular girls bribe the bully to punch people they don’t like, using numbered ratings to describe how hard. They also have a closed-door daily restroom debriefing called “The Fang Zone,” which the boys know about enough to spy on it by balancing a cell phone on top of a pipe. I must’ve missed when they mentioned that the bitchy chainsmoking “Fang” is Bug’s sister. Back at home Fang reveals Bug’s secret backstory through narrated childhood flashback while beating him to a bloody pulp and calling him a “maggot.”

I guess if I’m gonna describe everything weird about the movie we’re gonna be here for a week, so let me just skip to the highlight reel. There’s the scene where Bug and Dunkelman suddenly play the mirror game like in an acting class while scary horror movie plays. There are the many off-putting cuts, like the one that goes from comical boy-and-girl-screaming-when-they-see-each-other-in-the-bathroom to police car arriving at murder scene. There’s the awkward expositional dialogue that never turns out to be relevant, like when the principal forces “I’ve been a principal here for six months” inappropriately into a conversation. There’s the part where Bug confronts Dunkelman about whether or not he’s a killer. He admits that he is, but not the killer – he coincidentally has just come from off-screen murdering his abusive stepfather. (What is this, MYSTIC RIVER?)

And I don’t know why, but there seems to be some sort of nut motif:

1. Fang threatens Bug with a pair of scissors, screaming “Watch your nuts, little squirrel!”

2. Several shots prominently display Bug’s poster that shows a squirrel and says “Protect Your Nuts.”

3. He has a big bowl of nuts sitting on a table in his room.

This doesn’t have to do with nuts, but it’s weird: the end credits have a crudely animated California condor flying around, sometimes wearing clothes.

The working title for the movie was 25/8. I read many times that it was about these seven kids who were born on the day when a serial killer died, August 25th. On the DVD Craven says that actually it meant that to fight evil you gotta work 25 hours a day, 8 days a week, but they had to change it because people kept thinking it was a date. Huh.

So I didn’t really catch on until the last stretch, but the hook of the movie is this: the Riverton Ripper is killing again, either through one of his seven souls that were transferred into the bodies of 7 kids born on the day that he died, OR also it is possible that he didn’t die and is still alive living in the woods, and the kids don’t have his souls at all, they just were born on the day when he was mistakenly thought to have died, and I guess in that scenario he would be trying to kill them because of that. Catchy, huh? I can’t really figure out why this didn’t catch on.

Okay, I changed my mind, I know for sure that “good” is not the right adjective for this movie. But whatever you want to call it I gotta admit I enjoyed being confused by it.

Part 2 continues directly from part 1, with Danielle Harris pulling a James-LeGros-in-PHANTASM-2 and taking over for whoever played the last survivor in part 1. She gets away and comes back to Reverend Zombie(Tony Todd)’s shop where she took a tour boat from. She wants help killing that fuckin ghost, ’cause he killed her dad and brother. So the Reverend puts together a group of hunters to send out after Crowley, including her and her uncle Bob (Tom Holland – yes, the same Tom Holland who directed CHILD’S PLAY and wrote PSYCHO II – in kind of a Sydney Pollack type role).

I gotta say, alot of the problems I had with part 1 have been addressed. So you’re welcome for all the great tips I gave in my review, fellas. The score is by the same guy, Andy (not Spiderman) Garfield, but as requested it sounds like a real orchestra this time instead of a pathetic keyboard one. That’s an important step toward capturing the atmosphere of the type of slasher movies they’re trying to revive here (unless they’re just trying to revive the shitty ones that you regret renting). The swamp locations, while still somewhat limited, have more variety than part 1. The characters split up to be picked off one-by-one – a poor strategy on their part, but more fun to watch than everybody standing on one tiny swamp set in one big group. And Tony Todd’s stupid cameo character is expanded and actually given something interesting to do. First he wipes off that ugly face paint around his eye, then he makes a pretty good recruiting speech, then proves to have a less-than-heroic plan (luring people from Crowley’s past to be killed in hopes it will break the ghostly curse). It’s not a role as good as Candyman, but it’s nothing to be ashamed of. At least it’s got a little bit of a twist to it.

Unfortunately there’s still a lackluster structure. After a promising horror opening it’s Tony Todd giving an overly long revised-for-the-sequel-backstory info-dump, then any momentum is stopped dead with a long meeting of the hunters that gets off on a wacky-black-guy-comic-relief tangent about Chips Ahoy cookies. I believe that’s actually a Michael Bay move: pick the exact moment when you should be building tension and suspense to instead go off on some stupid bullshit that must’ve seemed funny at the time.

And then the movie just spins its wheels for a while to pad it out to feature length. The actor Parry Shen, whose character died in the first one, comes back as the twin brother and does one of those “funny” scenes where you have to put up with a bad fake Cajun accent for a couple minutes before somebody points out that it’s a bad fake Cajun accent and that’s supposed to make it okay. Fortunately most of the movie is more serious than that, but there’s alot of dead weight in the middle section here. It’s 52 minutes into the 89 minute movie when Crowley shows up the second time.

Luckily during that small chunk of the movie when the horror shit is going on there is some enjoyably preposterous gore. In the opening, for example, Crowley reels a guy in by his intestine, then strangles him with it. I think we can all get behind that. Like Jason he has alot of gas-powered power tools that he enjoys using as weapons, for example a power sander that he uses to sand through somebody’s skull. He also beheads a guy in the midst of the ol’ doggystyle sex – the body jerks around as the blood sprays out, apparently satisfying his partner. That scene also has what I thought was a funny exchange where the girl, talking dirty, asks the guy if he likes it (yes), then if he likes it as much as ice cream (uh, yes), then if he likes it as much as Jesus, to which he mutters, “Well, that’s inappropriate.”

The supporting cast includes R.A. Mihailoff (Leatherface from Texas Chain Saw 3) and John Carl Buechler (director of FRIDAY THE 13TH PART VII: THE NEW BLOOD). Most of the cast is not terrible, but it’s never pretty when not-great actors are forced to play these phony small town characters with badly written folksy dialogue where they say shit like “fixin’” (as in Hey mama, I’m fixin’ to go to the town store to pick up some vittles for supper).

Harris is basically the leading lady (I wouldn’t say she’s the Final Girl, since she’s already set up as the heroine at the beginning). Having been in HALLOWEEN 4-5 and ROB ZOMBIE’S HALLOWEEN 1-2, not to mention MARKED FOR DEATH, she sort of knows what she’s doing in this sort of movie. I think she adds a little gravity to the thing with her serious covered-in-blood, out-for-revenge performance, although there are a couple points when you get tired of her freaking out and screaming at everybody.

But I liked the part where she was in the shower and reached for a hand gun. That’s a thing you see in every slasher movie combined with a thing you don’t see in enough.

The movie was released unrated in the United States, which almost never happens. Then it got abruptly pulled from release mid-week, which is even rarer. Some internetters are spinning this as some kind of censorship issue, but that’s complete bullshit. The truth is the AMC chain was cool enough to try out the experiment of running an unrated movie, but quickly found that since newspapers or TV won’t run ads nobody knew the fuckin thing existed, and if they did that didn’t necessarily mean they saw HATCHET, and if they did that may likely mean they would therefore not want to see HATCHET II. So the movie made about negative twenty six dollars and they realized it was a better financial move to replace it with extra shows of some other dying movie from previous weeks. You can’t really fault them for that.

Anyway, not very good, but a whole lot better than the first one. I also kind of liked writer/director Adam Green’s other movie FROZEN, so there is some improvement in his skills. And I don’t know about you fellas, but I’m pro-improvement.

People have pointed out that this has alot of similarities to HALLOWEEN 2 and I agree, especially if you’re talking about the Rob Zombie version. It’s got the Final Girl in shock, staggering in the street hours after apparently killing the slasher. It’s got the gruesome crime scene investigation and body collection with the original actors playing their bodies. And of course it has the killer inexplicably coming alive to stalk the Final Girl in a spooky mostly-abandoned hospital at night.

I like that it’s a different location but still recaptures some of the elements of the first one: smart female protagonists, relationships treated seriously but without going into a huge amount of detail, simple, straightforward photography, modern and slick but not flashy. I also appreciate the non-ironic Part 2ness of it all, the way they fill in the backstory of this mountain man. A cop recognizes the birthmark on his eye, looks up the file on that missing kid, talks to a doctor who knew him and gets the straight Dr. Loomis style inside dope. SPOILER FOR PART 1: I took the revelation at the end to mean it was actually the parents who were the bad guys, they murdered this poor kid so he’s come back for revenge, maybe out of a combination of my-parents-tried-to-murder-me trauma and I-lived-by-myself-in-the-mountains savagery. (And by the way, why do these kids who turn into killers always have the god damn behemoth gene? If this guy or remake Michael Myers grew up to be short and stalky we wouldn’t be having these messes.)

Anyway Part 2 spins it differently. It argues that this kid was a monster from day 1, and the parents were probly killing him to save the lives of others. He was torturing animals, starting fires, you name it, but don’t worry, we don’t have to see a flashback of him getting bullied at school and wearing a Kiss t-shirt and all that. We get a more mythic description of how he started: he was stillborn, didn’t have a heartbeat until he laid there for a while. And then he didn’t cry. Creepy.

FRITT VILT actually translates to OPEN SEASON, but that title was already taken in the U.S. So in Norway COLD PREY is called OPEN SEASON, and what we call OPEN SEASON is called GRIZZLY MAN. What we call GRIZZLY MAN they call THE BAD NEWS BEARS, THE BAD NEWS BEARS they call COUNTRY BEARS, and COUNTRY BEARS they don't even have a title for at all because it's been banned.

With that story in place this guy becomes a higher level of movie slasher in my opinion, but don’t worry, they do a good job still keeping him mysterious. Even though he’s laying on a slab there the camera doesn’t examine him too much, and since his ski mask is frozen to his skin the doctors don’t even manage to get a good look at him. Jannicke even describes him as some kind of snow monster. This time around I realized that he really reminds me of the character Tiny from HOUSE OF THE ONE THOUSAND CORPSES and DEVIL’S REJECTS. More Rob Zombie.

Like part 1 it’s kind of weird about not taking advantage of all the conflicts it sets up. The new characters have every reason to believe Jannicke is wrong, or even the killer herself, but the movie doesn’t really go anywhere with that. But also like part 1 it’s a solid and well-executed slasher movie. It has alot of little character moments I like: the cop naively calling his wife to talk about microwaving his dinner and taping “Norway Tonight” before leaving to find a mass grave, the way one victim is smiling huge because of a girl he flirted with when he gets his throat slashed, the way Jannicke is careful not to cry or lose her shit in front of the kid, the long stare that Camilla and Jannicke share after one tells the other she’s going to die if she really intends to take a snowmobile and go after this killer.

Camilla is a new character who shares heroine duties this time. She’s the one at the hospital who’s supposedly “good with people,” so she has to give Jannicke some bad news and ends up bonding with her. She doubts her “good with people” reputation but proves it to us over the course of the movie.

If there’s one innovative thing in the movie I think it’s the scene where the doctors try to do CPR on the mountain man. At first they think he’s dead but all the sudden he starts showing signs of life. They know he’s the killer but he’s also a human being, and they got the Hippocratic oath and all that. So they don’t hesitate. And of course Jannicke hears the commotion and runs in screaming for them to stop. I know FREDDY VS. JASON has a part where a member of Destiny’s child has to perform mouth-to-mouth on Jason so that he can be alive to fight Freddy, but this is a different context. I don’t think I’ve seen another slasher movie where medics try to save the killer’s life because they’re humane. Hats off to you, Norway.