Starring: Michael Robertson, Rich Hamilton, Robin Lilly, Lori Tirgrath
“Tear her to pieces! Bite through the bone! Gulp the blood! Gobble the flesh!” (Glen Randall, Beware: Children At Play)
The fine people at Troma specialise in making and distributing incredibly low-budget films that, while lacking in spectacle, certainly aren’t lacking in ambition and sheer balls. Beware: Children At Play is one such movie, one with a plot so taboo there’s no way it’d be distributed by a big studio.
It tells the story of John DeWolfe, an author who specialises in crime and the paranormal. He travels to the countryside with his wife and daughter to visit his friend Ross, who’s a sheriff in a tiny country town. Ross’s daughter has been missing for weeks, as have many of the other children in the area, and he wants to know if John has any ideas on how to find them.
It's so much like Children Of The Corn they've even got a corpse up on a cross
What they don’t realise is that all the missing kids – Ross’s daughter included – have formed an odd group of feral children who, under the leadership of an older, manipulative teenager, roam the woods killing and eating anyone who steps onto their turf. Sometimes one of them will head back to the town to lure adults into following them into the woods and to their death, or at times if it’s a woman who’s been trapped the older teen will rape her to try and keep the evil seed going. Or something, I dunno. It’s just an excuse to get some baps on the screen, though it’s pretty dodgy. Continue reading “Beware: Children At Play (1989)”→
Starring: Sigourney Weaver, Michael Biehn, Paul Reiser, Lance Henriksen, Bill Paxton, Jenette Goldstein, Carrie Henn
“We’d better get back, cause it’ll be dark soon and they mostly come at night. Mostly.” (Newt, Aliens)
It’s very rare that a sequel not only offers a complete change of pace from that of its predecessor but also manages to match it in terms of quality. Aliens is one such film, one that has a very different feel to Alien but is still a fantastic film regardless.
After her epic battle with the Alien at the end of the first movie, Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) takes a well-deserved rest in her ship’s hypersleep chamber. Turns out she was a little too tired though, because she remains asleep in suspended animation for 57 years and by the time she’s found by a salvage ship and brought back to the company she used to work for she’s told her 10-year-old daughter has died of old age.
Safe to say, Ronaldinho's dentist had a hell of a job ahead of her
The company doesn’t believe Ripley’s stories about the parasites they found on the planet in the first film, explaining to her that there’s a colony of people living there now and they haven’t reported any problems. They suspend her from her duties for destroying their pricey mining ship in the first film, and tell her to go see a psychiatrist. That is, until a few months later, when they come crawling back and tell her that they can’t get in touch with the colonists on the planet and have the feeling something’s wrong. Hmmm, wonder what it could be, hope they’re alright. Continue reading “Aliens (1986)”→
“They say he still roams the nuthouse, ever hopeful of a chance to escape, so he can take his evil revenge out on us all.” (Skip, Slaughter High)
After Friday The 13th made the cheap slasher movie popular, a slew of imitators were quickly churned out over the following years. One notable example was Slaughter High, which was originally called April Fool’s Day but had a quick last-minute title change after it was noticed that Paramount had its own film called April Fool’s Day set for release that year. The moniker modification came so late, in fact, that the film’s title card still says “April Fool’s Day” with a hastily added “AKA Slaughter High” superimposed on the bottom! Turns out Slaughter High was a much better title anyway, because not only is it actually set in an abandoned high school, you can also do some tinkering with your video box and change the title to the far more appropriate Laughter High fairly easily.
Jamie Oliver's cookery class for forgetful people didn't go too smoothly
Slaughter High begins with a flashback in which the implausibly nerdy Marty (Simon Scuddamore) is coaxed into the girls’ locker room by the school hottie, Carol (Caroline Munro), for some apparent sexy times. What he doesn’t realise is that it’s April Fool’s Day and Carol and her friends are actually playing an elaborate practical joke on him. After an extremely embarrassing incident involving a surprising degree of male nudity and inappropriate touching, Marty flees to the emotional security of his beloved chemistry lab to continue his school project. Unfortunately, there he becomes the victim of another, harsher practical joke, one which sets the lab on fire and leaves Marty hideously scarred for life. Continue reading “Slaughter High (1986)”→
Starring: Romy Schneider, Harvey Keitel, Harry Dean Stanton, Max Von Sydow
Also known as: La Mort En Direct (original title)
“People used to get ulcers, cancer, go mad. We don’t let them anymore.” (Dr Mason, Deathwatch)
GUEST REVIEWER – Ronan Martin
Sometimes a piece of cinema, deserving of a much larger audience, simply slips into obscurity without much so much as a whimper having been made in its defence. Conversely, the world is cluttered with DVD copies of films that should never have been made, let alone watched (not pointing any elbows). Our shops, and subsequently our shelves at home, are full of the kind of garbage that people hastily grab off shelves at 5pm on Christmas Eve shouting: “Ach, I’ll just get him this. It’s got that guy from The Transporter in it. He’s good, isn’t he?”
"Yes, I can read it. It says C... U... N... hmm, I can't read the rest of it. Ah, no, wait, I've got it. CUNNING."
At TWABM, we wouldn’t be doing our job if we didn’t occasionally point you in the direction of interesting films you may have forgotten about or missed altogether. French Director Bertrand Tavernier’s La Mort En Direct (or Death Watch, as it was known in the UK) is one such cult gem. It serves as a prophetic tale of the often cynical world of reality TV and also provides a fascinating snapshot of the city of Glasgow in the late 1970s. The film, never mass produced for DVD sale in the UK, should be considered essential viewing for cult cinema fans and will be of particular interest to Glaswegians. For one, Scottish audiences will no doubt marvel at a young Robbie Coltrane looking strangely slender in comparison to his Cracker heyday! Continue reading “Death Watch (1980)”→
Starring: Robert Forster, Robin Riker, Michael Gazzo
“I’m gonna go out there, I’m gonna find that alligator, and I’m gonna kick its ass.” (David, Alligator)
Here’s a top tip – if your young daughter does something that annoys you, don’t flush her pet baby alligator down the toilet to punish her. Chances are, twelve years later the alligator will still be living in the sewers and will have mutated into a huge beast by eating genetically modified dogs. Oh, and according to Alligator, your daughter will also mysteriously age about 20 years and become a redhead.
Alligator is a fun creature feature that doesn’t take itself too seriously. It follows David Madison, a Chicago cop investigating a number of body parts that have mysteriously been turning up in the city’s water filtration systems. It soon emerges that there’s an alligator living in the sewers, one much bigger than any other alligator known to man.
Well, if you're going to get out of your car like a dick that's the risk you take
You see, a local pharmaceutical company has been experimenting with hormones. They’ve been illegally acquiring dogs, injecting them with a serum that makes them grow quickly, then dumping them into the sewer when they’re finished with them. The gator’s then been eating them, hence its ridiculous size. After going into the sewers and seeing the gator eat one of his partners, David has to convince his fellow cops – as well as an alligator specialist (who’s the little girl grown up) – what they’re dealing with. Continue reading “Alligator (1980)”→
“The Creature stole my Twinkie.” (Eugene, The Monster Squad)
Kids’ films in the 1980s were much better than they are today. They had an edge to them, a realism that most of today’s films are too scared to address. You only need to look at Spielberg’s 2002 re-release of ET, in which he digitally removed the guns being held by the agents and replaced them with walkie-talkies. In short, today’s children’s movies are for pussies.
Anyone who’s recently watched The Goonies will know exactly what I mean. The kids in that film acted realistically, they had an attitude, they got into nasty scrapes, they wanted to see women’s boobs, they make fun of the fat kid, and every now and then they’ll swear to sound tough (but only in each other’s company, mind, never when an adult’s around). It felt real. Ditto, then, with The Monster Squad, a similar film of that era which for some odd reason never gained the same cult following as that other much-loved “group of kids go on an adventure” movie. Continue reading “The Monster Squad (1987)”→
Starring: Ed Harris, Leslie Nielsen, Ted Danson, Tom Atkins, Hal Holbrook, Stephen King, EG Marshall
“You see that crap? All that horror crap? Things coming out of crates and eating people? Dead people coming back to life? People turning into weeds, for christ sake? Well, you want him reading that stuff? All right then! I took care of it. That’s why God made fathers, babe. That’s why God made fathers.” (Stan, Creepshow)
If you’ve read my previous review of Creepshow 3, you’ll have noticed that it has the dubious honour of one measly Trevor mask as its rating. This wasn’t just because Creepshow 3 is bad – it most certainly is – but also because its predecessors were so good that the third film let the entire series down. To cheer myself up then I decided to re-watch the original Creepshow over the festive period.
Well, it certainly beats a caterpillar cake
If you’re not familiar with it, Creepshow is a collection of five short stories written by Stephen King and directed by George A Romero (back when he was still good and not slapping his name on any old shite for a fiver). It’s an homage to the old EC comics of the 1950s like Tales From The Crypt and Vault Of Horror, and as such each story starts and ends as if it were in a comic book, with garish colours and speech bubbles. It’s an interesting style that not everyone will love but it’s fun and keeps things light-hearted. Make no mistake, this may be a collection of horror stories but (much like the EC comics themselves) its tongue is planted firmly in its rotting cheek and its five tales of morality are much funnier than they are scary. Continue reading “Creepshow (1982)”→
Starring: Felissa Rose, Jonathan Tiersten, Karen Fields
Also known as: Nightmare Vacation (UK VHS)
BILL: “Eat shit and die, Ricky!” RICKY: “Eat shit and live, Bill.”
My first encounter with Sleepaway Camp was an unassuming purchase at a second-hand DVD shop in a Glasgow market. I was a member of a horror forum at the time and I vaguely remembered it being a part of someone’s list of horror films that were worth checking out. I had slight recollections that there was a reason it was such essential viewing but for the life of me I couldn’t remember why.
This (wo)man is guilty of the worst acting ever committed to celluloid
I took it home and there it sat for a few weeks, until eventually I watched it with my brother late one night. We were used to watching cheesy ’80s camp slashers and for the first 80 minutes of its 84-minute duration Sleepaway Camp is a prime example of this, with its hilariously bad acting and inventive, gruesome deaths. And then the ending came, with an image that will forever be burnt into the minds of my brother and I for the rest of our lives.
Angela and her cousin Ricky… but who’s the killer?
The general plot seems fairly run-of-the-mill. After a man and one of his children die in a horrible boat accident, the man’s sister takes in the other, orphaned child and raises it as one of her own. Fast-forward to ten years later and the child, Angela, heads off to summer camp with her cousin Ricky. As you’d expect, shit starts to go down at the camp and people start dropping off in gruesome ways, but who’s behind the killings?
The new series of Bullseye had started horribly wrong
Sleepaway Camp feels like a real labour of love. Despite the sub-standard acting which ranges from wooden (most of the counsellors are as one-dimensional as an x-axis) to ridiculously over-the-top (the actress – at least, I think it’s a woman – playing Angela’s aunt really has to be seen to be believed), it’s clear that everyone’s having a ball making this film and this comes across in the relationships with the children. Sure, they can’t act, but you find yourself not really caring.
Without even taking the ending into account (I’ll get to that later… no spoilers though, of course), Sleepaway Camp is littered with scenes that are surprisingly dark and grisly for a standard slasher film, especially considering most of the victims aren’t the older teen camp counsellors we’re used to in this sort of film, but actually the children attending the camp.
You’ll squirm as one of the girls gets hair curlers thrust into an unmentionable area, wince as a young lad is stung to death by bees, cheer as the paedophile chef (yes, really) gets what’s coming to him and gasp as you see a brief glimpse of a group of mutilated eight-year-olds. Yes, it might be cheesy and low-budget, but Sleepaway Camp isn’t fucking around.
Genuine dialogue: “She’s a real carpenter’s dream… flat as a board and needs a screw”
And then there’s the ending (which I refuse to even hint at). It’s a true shock becomes it comes completely out of nowhere, yet still makes sense in the context of the story. The film lulls you into a false sense of superiority as you’re more or less certain to guess the killer within the film’s first 25 minutes. It’s so obvious it’s almost laughable, and you sit patiently waiting for the ‘shock’ reveal when they’re exposed as the perpetrator. But then it throws a curveball at the last minute by revealing that the killer’s identity was never supposed to be the big twist, it was always meant to be something entirely different and far more shocking.
I urge you to track down Sleepaway Camp. It’s 80 minutes of fun, cheesy camp slasher gold, topped off with what’s genuinely one of the most memorable endings in cinematic history. You will not get that final image out of your head, I guarantee it.
Starring: Linda Hamilton, Peter Horton, Courtney Gains
“Our time of tribulation has come. A test is at hand. A final test.” (Isaac, Children Of The Corn)
Films based on Stephen King books are a mixed bunch. You have your great films that are unfortunately not much to do with the book (The Shining), your great films that stick nearly 100% to the book (Pet Sematary), your non-horror films (Stand By Me) and your pieces of shit (Dreamcatcher). Having not read the short story Children Of The Corn is based on I am not at liberty to suggest which category this film falls into, but needless to say it’s sure to be one of the first two because this is a fantastic flick.
A doctor and his girlfriend are moving to the big city so he can set up a surgery. Whilst driving past a cornfield they hit a boy who steps onto the road. Realising he had already been stabbed, the doctor puts the body in his trunk and drives to the nearest town to get some help. Trouble is, the nearest town is Gatlin, a small countryside village much like any other you’d care to name. As long as you’re naming one in which the children have killed all the adults and are members of a religious cult.
This is Isaac. He's weird.
There must be something about Stephen King books that makes their film translations scarier than usual. I can personally sit through 95% of most 80’s horrors without batting an eyelid. ‘Tense’ chase scenes don’t usually affect me and I can work out when the big scares are coming in most of the films, as they were more predictable back then. However, of the countless ’80s horror films that attempt to scare the viewer, only two I’ve seen so far succeed in making me feel extremely uneasy: Pet Sematary and Children Of The Corn.
The film opens with a flashback of events that took place three years before the film is set, and right away the audience is thrown into the mix with a number of ‘scythe n’ knife’-related killings and a freaky looking Amish lad who looks as if he hasn’t slept for 7 months. In time however, you may grow to feel sorry for him. Maybe.
The thing that really wins me over with Children Of The Corn is the imperfection of the two lead characters. Whereas in most films the hero is the virgin who never smokes, always does the right thing and collects injured birds off the road and gives them baths, Children Of The Corn forces you to question your feelings on the heroes. This kicks off right from the first scene, where Burt refuses to propose to his girlfriend Vicky and doesn’t seem to have time for her. Meanwhile, when Burt suggests they take the injured kid’s body into town to get help Vicky at first refuses, showing a coldness not many ‘hero’ characters demonstrate. While this could have so easily resulted in a film with characters that the audience feels no sympathy for when they get involved in later events, the excellent performances by Peter Horton and Linda Hamilton coupled with the effective script only make the characters more believable, bringing the audience closer and making it easier for them to relate to Burt and Vicky (after all, nobody’s perfect).
This is Malachai. He's a twat.
The real stars are the children, though. There are good kids, bad kids (the nameless ones who always seem to be there whenever someone pegs it) and batshit mental kids (Isaac, the leader of the cult). And then there’s Malachai. Never before have I hated a character more than I hated Malachai. Perhaps the young actor playing him (Courtney Gains) was tapping into the years of mockery he received for having a girl’s name, or perhaps he’s actually like the character, but this boy’s sneer makes you want to punch his head off and you really want him to get what’s coming to him (which, at the end of the day, is what the filmmakers intended). I’d love to have been at that casting meeting: “I think we should give the role of Malachai to young Courtney Gains, because he’s a complete prick”.
Although for the most part Children Of The Corn isn’t too dodgy, it does contain one of film’s biggest taboos: the brutal killing of children. Some of the adults get theirs too, especially at the start, but when you’ve got a town full of kids and they’re all a bit mental, some of them are going to have to take a kicking.
This film would have received a full 5/5 if it hadn’t been for one disappointing aspect; the ending. Perhaps this is how it ends in the book, but as soon as the dirt started moving Tremors-style and getting a little out there I was disappointed. Had the film stayed away from special effects at the end and kept to the idea of a religious cult it would have been a far more satisfying ending. As it is, it gives the impression that the kids actually knew something we didn’t and maybe weren’t so mental after all… a pretty weak end to a fantastic story.
This is also true for the last scene. The last 30 seconds are so underwhelming that when you see the words “The End” you can’t help but think that ending was just thought up at the end of shooting in order to get a final scare in there (and I use the word ‘scare’ loosely). Don’t let that put you off however. Children Of The Corn is 88 minutes long. Of these 88 minutes, 80 are fantastic. It’s just a shame those last eight were so disappointing.
Director: Mik Cribben
That Was A Bit Mental 