EVIIIIIIIIIIIIL!

In keeping with the Loose Cannons Podcast, I recently re-watched the 1980 slasher New Year's Evil.

A psychopath (Kip Niven) leaves a trail of bodies on his way to a New Year's Bash celebration hosted by popular VJ Diane Sullivan (Roz Kelly). Will she still be alive at the stroke of midnight?

Now, I say re-watched, but I remembered very little of it, as this was another title that I saw through Elvira's Movie Macabre in the early nineties. As far as eighties slashers go, this is pretty low on the totem pole. The movie featured very little gore, was overly convoluted at times, and seemed to often forget that it is a slasher, like when the killer suddenly decided to start wearing a mask well into the last reel.

Black Christmas styles!

Having said that, New Year's Evil does have some entertaining qualities. The theme song was so catchy that the filmmakers decided to use it in its entirety a total of three times. The depiction of “New Wave Rock” culture was pretty laughable, as seen when the band was playing some weird blues-y riff and the crowd basically looked they were moshing to a ballad. It was also pretty amusing to see them try and fill the venue with thirty or so extras. You can actually hear the echoing emptiness of the room as they shuffle around.

I think the filmmakers were trying to create another slasher icon by naming him Evil, but he's actually kind of shit at his vocation. I admit that the idea of a guy who kills people every hour leading up to New Year's Eve – representing each time zone – was pretty cool, but the closer he got, the more he started mucking things up. I suppose I should say SPOILER here, but do you really give a shit? By the time he reached Diane Sullivan, and it was revealed that he was, in fact, her husband – I wonder if Nightmares in A Damaged Brain scooped this twist from here – the gig was pretty much up.

He proceeded to spew out some misogyny just before the cops showed up and he threw himself (or at least a poorly disguised mannequin) off the roof. The movie then ends with her son Derek (Grant Kramer), who has spent most of the running time doing all sorts of weird stuff with pantyhose, picking up where his father left off. As you would.

We need to talk about Derek.

In complete contrast to the films of today, almost everybody in the movie is played by someone who is older than they should be. I think in that regard I prefer it the way it is today. It also had a scene in a Drive-In and I always like those. If I'm not mistaken, the movie playing may have been footage from an earlier Cannon release (The Lady In Red Kills Seven Times). There's a bit of free trivia for you. New Year's Evil isn't great, but it's serviceable, much like a lot of the horrors that were being churned out by this point in the early eighties.

Skissors!

Keeping in sync with the Loose Cannons Podcast, I watched David Paulsen’s 1980 slasher Schzoid this week.

As if it’s not bad enough that advice columnist Julie (Marianna Hill) is receiving threatening letters, someone is also killing off the members of her therapy group. Will she be next?

I had seen this movie before, but my recollections were very few and far between, having watched the shaved-down Movie Macabre version some twenty-five years ago. As a thriller, it’s pretty mediocre with a bait & switch that fools pretty much no one. However, if you can get past the super gross father-daughter relationship between Klaus Kinski and Donna Wilkes – I wonder if this is why he took the part – the movie did have its charms.

Ewwwwwwwwwwww!

The cast, which also included Craig Wasson, Richard Herd and Christopher Lloyd were great and all given entertaining, if not extraneous, bits to chew on. If seeing Wasson infatuate over wallpaper and Lloyd drone on about his one love – being a maintenance man – then boy, are you in for a treat!

Wasson with wallpaper.

The best are the exchanges between the two cops, Herd and Joe Regalbuto, though. Apart from the usual “man this job is really getting to me” repartee, there’s this hilarious bit where they decide to show Hill all their homicide files, just to prove how busy they are. But then, literally the next scene, they were all “we can’t divulge that info” when Kinski asked for a victim’s cause of death. That’s a real tight ship you’re running there, guys.

But really, I think the star of this movie is the score by Craig Huxley. Holy shit, it is bonkers! At times, it sounds like he just let a bunch of cats loose in a room full of instruments. My favourite was the sting that accompanied the first reveal of the murder weapon. It sounded like Michael Jackson’s Thriller!

BAA-DAAAAAH!

What I found particularly strange was that the brutality of the murders often didn't match up with the tone of the rest of the picture. The movie also meanders a lot in the middle, which makes me think it may have been a perfect movie to get the Elvira treatment. Schzoid lies in that sizable list of B-movies that were populated by slumming established actors rubbing elbows with others who were on their way to bigger and better things – Lloyd would become Doc Brown only five years later.

Still, I did have a smile-slash-smirk on my face while watching a good deal of this, so that’s something. That’s Cannon to a T though, isn’t it?

Ahh, The Classics.

I decided to go big, and post the mother of all intros today. Here's the awesome ident for Cannon Films (complete with authentic tracking static).

Cannon Films was synonymous with home video. If you were renting B-movies back in the eighties, it would've been impossible for you to not come across that logo above. As you may know (especially if you've been following along with the Loose Cannons podcast), Cannon was established in the late sixties, but didn't really hit its stride until Israeli businessmen Menahem Golan & Yoram Globus took over in the late seventies.

They produced and distributed dozen of films that ranged from action pictures like Sho Kosugi's ninja trilogy (Enter the Ninja, Revenge of the Ninja and Ninja III: The Domination) and Chuck Norris' action vehicles (Delta Force, Invasion USA) to crazy off-the-wall fare like The Apple.

As for horror fare, they released plenty, including X-Ray, Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 and Lifeforce. I actually saw a bunch of Cannon's horror titles through Elvira's Movie Macabre in the early nineties, as they must have had a deal with them or something. Specifically in the show's fourth season, I remember staying up to watch (it came on after Saturday Night Live) the likes of Alien Contamination, Dr. Heckyll & Mr. Hype, New Year's Evil & Schzoid to name a few.

The above intro was taken from my badly beat up VHS copy of Tobe Hooper's 1986 remake of Invaders From Mars.

Anyway, have a great weekend, guys!

Evil Things Come In Small Packages.

For those of you that haven't been following the Loose Cannons podcast, their newest episode marks the entrance into Cannon Films' golden age – the eighties. Cannon's first project of the decade was Gabrielle Beaumont's The Godsend, for which I watched for today's edition of VHS Fridays.

After Alan (Malcolm Stoddard) & Kate (Cyd Hayman) find themselves caring for an abandoned baby, their family is visited by tragedy after tragedy. Could their adopted daughter be the cause?

So, there's really no way around it. This felt like a diluted knock-off of 1976's The Omen. While it is true the book by Bernard Taylor on which The Godsend was based came out that same year, it's difficult to deny that it wasn't influenced heavily by the Richard Donner classic. They both share many of the same beats, but The Godsend goes for subtlety over its more colourful counterpart, thus being noticeably less interesting as a result.

The movie begins almost instantly with a strange pregnant woman (Angela Pleasance, daughter of Donald) being invited into the unsuspecting family's home. Then, no sooner than you can say placenta, she's dropped a fetus and peaced out. Pleasance's performance was such I couldn't decide whether it was creepy or awkward. She had this weird thousand-yard stare and the way she moved around made me think at one point her character was supposed to be blind. Anyway, the couple seemed to be immediately on board with keeping this thing, even though they already had four (yes, FOUR) kids. And, that included two gingers and another baby. What a fucking nightmare! I mean, that is literally a horror movie right there, am I right? And that's even before “Bonnie” started knocking them off.

Angela Pleasance as The Strang-- Can you please stop looking at me like that??

So, the children started dying in mysterious ways and only the last daughter remained before the father started to clue in. The mother was completely blinded by love, despite her tripping over her daughter's doll – losing yet another child – and her husband left sterile from contracting the mumps (who knew that was a thing?) and continued to think everything was hunky-dory. Kate was really good at compartmentalizing grief, I'll give her that.

The father pretty much does everything short of killing his evil orphan, but she always seems to be in the right spot when anyone is precariously leaning over a high drop. I mean, seriously, after one or two of your siblings drop, you think you'd be a bit more wary of your surroundings.

#FatherFail

As a horror film, the subject matter was familiar, but sadly most of the bad stuff happened offscreen. We certainly don't get anything as ace as someone getting their head sheared off by a plate of glass, so the proceedings were rather less than. I will say, however, that the girls (Wilhelmina Green & Joanne Boorman) they got to play Bonnie at various ages could glower with the best of them.

I wouldn't put this in the upper echelon of killer kid movies, but it was still fairly well put together, and Alan's attempts to convince Kate their daughter was evil were pretty hilarious in a did-you-really-think-this-would-work kind of way.

I have a solution. Don't have kids. Problem solved. The End.

She Don't Wanna Dance.

Catching up with the Loose Cannons podcast, I finally got around to watching the subject of their Halloween episode, The Lady In Red Kills Seven Times.

When people around a young fashion photographer named Kitty (Barbara Bouchet) start dropping like flies, she wonders if it really is her family curse (where an ancestor referred to as The Red Queen comes back from the dead every hundred years to take seven lives) or just someone trying to angle in on her family inheritance.

This was a great giallo that easily makes into the upper echelon of the dozens that are out there. It has pretty much everything you could ask for, an interesting looking killer (a figure in a white mask and red cloak) a score from one of the greats, Ennio Morricone and a wonderfully stylish look. The latter you would expect, of course, but I love how space is used in this film. Everything is wide open, whether it be something dramatic like this;

or just the layout of someone's apartment. It's all so beautifully cinematic.

It also wouldn't be a giallo without a convoluted plot, of which The Lady has in spades. I think there are more characters in this than Blood & Black Lace and Bay of Blood combined. I'm exaggerating, but it is extremely difficult to keep this bevvy of beauties straight without a score card. Apart from the striking Barbara Bouchet (who also appeared in Lucio Fulci's awesome Don't Torture A Duckling and Silvio Amadio's Amuck that features one of my fave lines ever in “that woman is a mystery I'd rather not solve!”) and a young Sybil Danning, the rest run together in a haze of seventies hairstyles.

Barbara Bouchet as Kitty Wildenbrück in The Lady In Red Kills 7 Times

Regardless of whether you may always be following what the hell's going on, you will never be bored. There are several great murder scenes in this, one including a fence spire and another of someone getting curbed – although not quite as well executed as when Dario Argento did it three years later in Profondo Rosso. I'd say the only thing I didn't like was a super unnecessary rape that got thrown in, almost as an afterthought. It's gross and also makes the next scene fairly comical when the assailant approaches Kitty saying, “I know who the killer is! Hey, why are you running away??”

So, if you like gialli, this is definitely a must watch because, well, it has all of the things that make them great. It also has a colour in the title which is kind of a prerequisite.

Handy giallo title generator.

Trailer Tuesdays: Psychic Killer

I've been recently been catching up on Loose Cannons podcast episodes and just finished one for 1973's Psychic Killer.

This one sounds like tons of fun and as if I needed anymore nudging, it was written by Greydon Clark, director of such masterworks as Uninvited (aka Cat on a Cruise Ship!) and Without Warning.

To listen to the Loose Cannons podcast about this movie, click here. And in case you were wondering (I'm sure you weren't) yes, Psychic Killer isn't a Cannon film, but the guys mistakenly watched it thinking it was the John Saxon starring crime film Family Killer. How'd they fuck that up? Well, it's a long story...  

I, Loose Cannon.

Hey gang. You may have heard me talk about the Loose Cannons podcast in the past. Since February, Toronto cinephiles Justin Decloux & Mathew Kumar have been systematically going through the entire catalogue of Cannon Films and then recording their thoughts.

I guested on this week's episode, which focused on the 1973 picture I, Monster, Amicus' 1971 retelling of Jekyll & Hyde starring Christopher Lee & Peter Cushing. Click on the image below to listen to the episode.

Sadly, this was recorded the day before the news of Lee's passing, so we unfortunately didn't get the chance to reflect on Lee's legacy. It sucks because we kind of slag the movie, but at least Kumar does comment on Lee's sex appeal...

Anyway, enjoy!