Short Reviews for Nov. 29, 2010: Wynorski and Misc.

Three Jim Wynorski Films
Sorority House Massacre II (1990) - 2.5/4

Jim Wynorski to the rescue. If you weren't already confused, in the stunning sequel, Wynorski gives you flashbacks to SLUMBER PARTY Massacre instead of SORORITY HOUSE Massacre, which this is supposed to be the sequel to. So even the director can't keep 'em straight. No matter, 'cause Wynorski takes all that was right about Slumber Party Massacre--great titties--and gives us more, more, more. Wynorski contrives every event and every angle to show us more T&A, bless 'im.

Five bodacious babes who wear only underwear. Greatest thighs in a motion picture, Robyn Harris. Stacia Zhivago, who looks like Laura Dern as a pin-up girl--later became a doctor. Melissa Moore, a bit of a butterface, but what an amazon. Michelle Verran, the sweetest rack in the film. Dana Bentley, a raven-haired cutey with big nostrils, now surgeried herself into Pete Burns territory. Low-angle panties. High-angle cleavage. On her knees. Out in the rain just to get wet. Orville Ketchum, the man who never dies. Bridget Carney as Candy, the stripper with a booty so fine you'll cry tears of semen. Random racism from Abdul and Schmabdul. Satana the remarkably unsatanic stripper. Jealous lady cop. Random showers. Ouija board seance. Drunk titties. Angry titties. Betrayed titties. Afraid titties. Squeakin' titties. "Let's work together" titties. And of course, ass-kicking titties. And a little romance for the lady viewers.

Nekkid: 3/4
Gore: 2/4
Tequila-swillin' sluts: 5
Humour: 3/4

Sorority House Massacre III (1990) - 3.5/4

AKA Hard to Die (a much more appropriate title)

Read my review of Sorority House Massacre II? Well this is the same film cranked up to 11. Really, some scenes are lifted almost exactly from SHM2. Except this one's set in a upscale lingerie shop and not a sorority house at all. The temps are in for inventory and what kinda temps do they hire? College kids? Mike and Joel? Nope, they hire lingerie models! who wear lingerie and high heels almost the whole movie--except for when they take turns having a shower scene.

But that's not the essence of the film. No, this is an epic battle between good and evil, the great demon-hunter Orville Ketchum versus the diabolical spirit of Hokstatter, brought to its final chapter. Both are HARD TO DIE--the question is, who is HARDEST? Me, after watching these sexy babes romping around in their upscale panties with big guns.

Babes in lingerie. Titties squeak when you wash 'em. Orville still eats raw meat. Scared tits. Bloody tits. Soapy tits. Possessed tits. Gun-wielding tits. Bouncing tits. Naked tits. Wet tits. A few dead tits. Stabbing, shooting, stapling, paper-pick stabbing, ball-kicking, head-pounding, and choking. Weirdest Chinese food delivery costume ever. Burning weirdest Chinese food delivery costume ever. Babes with guns. Babes running. Babes bouncing. Babes climbing stairs. Babes moving boxes. Babes moving filing cabinets. Gratuitous porn shoot. Several gratuitous showers. Gratuitous dirty feet. And a little romance for the lady viewers.

Nekkid: 3/4
Gore: 1/4
Babes with guns: 3
Humour: 4/4

976-Evil II (1990) - 2/4

That wacky, Satanic calling service returns, this time without Sam Ritter (No? Google Image Search, safe search off, enjoy.), and unleashes more nonsensical terror. The film gives no further explanation, so why should I?

Hotline to Satan. Creepy old man. Evil creepy old man. Lecherous creepy old man. Waste of good POA. Bad Vincent Price impression. Good Vincent Price moustache. Great set piece: It's a Wonderful Life...with ZOMBIES! Death by television. Death by phantom car. Death by prop stalactite. Pizza attack. Oven attack. Daddy's little girl: nice tits and slutty, cut-off jeans. Half-wit cop. Exploding drunk. Tough guy on a bike--named Spike. Puttin' the move on Daddy's girl. Eatin' fries. Drinkin' beer. Ridin' the hog. Warnin' about the number. Breakin' n' enterin'. Scrutinizin' phone bills. Astral projectin'. Turnin' down Brigitte Nielsen circa 1990--he's gay. And a little romance for the lady viewers.

Nekkid: 0/4 - Really? In a Wynorski flick?
Gore: 1/4
Times you think, "That's not what a phone sounds like": 14
Humour: 2/4

Bikini Girls on Ice (2009) - 1/4

Bikini car wash meets random killer at a rundown gas station--the title tells the rest.

Lots of girls in bikinis. Cinematographer couldn't light his way out of a paper bag. Smart girl with deep voice, reluctant to wear bikini: obviously the Final Girl. Her peppy, cute friend with a touch-o-the-slut: obviously destined to be killed in a harrowing moment. Car washing montage. Prostitution. Pointless sex scene with a bonus, "Don't touch me!" Slutty girls. Bitchy girls. Lezzy girls. Nerds with a bus. Old man with a warning. French tourists with a gas can. Killer can move faster the light--screw you, Einstein. Killer makes no sound--obviously a ninja. Obsession with ice baths--definitely a ninja. Girls keep wandering off alone--guess what happens? Dead dog. Dead slut. Dead tourists. Dead bitch. Absence of girls with their bikinis OFF. Absence of interesting kills--unless black-outs interest you. Absence of interesting gore. Stupid, stubborn victims. Stupid, unimpressive killer. Deus ex machina--we saw that coming. And a little romance for the lady viewers.

Nekkid: 0/4!
Gore: 1/4
Times a victim asks the killer, "Why are you doing this?": 6
Humour: 1/4

As a Quebecer myself, I apologize for my fellow provincemen's lack of ambition and for such a disappointing waste of a good title and several good pieces of ass.

Hack-o-Lantern (1988) - 2/4

Produced and directed by Bollywood rejects Raj Mehrotra and Jag Mundhra respectively, Hack-o-Lantern is a preposterous satanic cult/slasher hybrid about a young man groomed by his grandpa to take over his cult.

Dad wants grandpa to leave the boy alone, so he's gonna head on out there. Turns out 'out there' is just next door, where a satanic cult is practicing a ritual no-one seemed to know about--just next door!

The boy grows into a moody, muscular loser who listens to metal and works out all day. One day he listens to metal and fantasizes a random '80s music video, in which a black girl struts down stairs, sticks out her tongue, and shoots '80s lasers at the band until only the boy is left.

Meanwhile, his sister is getting ready for a Halloween party and sets her best friend up with her normal brother. Normal enough. Then her brother screws her best friend in the cemetery on the first date. The best friend tells the sister about it and, rather than be disturbed, they go back to the cemetery together to look at the spot. Don't all sisters do that? Stare at their brothers' fresh hump-spots.

It's almost at the climactic showdown when a comedian (the great Bill Tucker, remember him? He's famous for being the comedian in Hack-o-Lantern!) steps out and begins doing a lengthy impression of a one-eyed turkey. What? I don't know.

Sexual harassment. Lecherous grandpa. Very campy grandpa. Incest. Truck full of pumpkins. Graveyard sex. Sex on top of a dead body. Satanic cult. Gee, grandpa's evil, whodathunkit? Random '80s metal video. Random awful comedian. Random snake lady. Geisha. Cowboy. Scary cult of... uh, about four people. '80s lazers. Satanist vs Satanist showdown, with pitchforks. Patricide. Matricide. Infanticide. Turkey impressions. Bald beaver. A few titties. Bad jokes. And a little romance for the lady viewers.

Nekkid: 2/4
Gore: 2/4
Awful puns: 5
Humour: 3/4 - kinda in Troll 2 territory here

Short Reviews for Nov. 22, 2010: Yuzna and Russo

This is a new feature on Lair of the Boyg. Because my reviews are usually so long and in-depth, I find I don't get to write about even a tenth of the films I'd like to write about. With a Short Reviews feature, I can provide lighter, free-form, more playful reviews that cover films I either can't or don't feel inclined to write about in depth.

Three Brian Yuzna Films:

Silent Night, Deadly Night 4 (1990) - 3.5/4

Sometimes you really do find a brilliant film buried in a sequel. Brian Yuzna's SNDN 4, for instance, subtitled 'The Initiation' is a Cronenbergian attempt to deal with the man-hating popular feminism of the '80s from a reasonable man's point of view. Borrowing ideas from the history of horror cinema, the film tells the story of an underappreciated but ambitious woman who takes a news story against her boss's wishes and finds herself sucked into the trap of a coven of witches. The film poses a lot of interesting questions about guilt, resentment, bigotry, religion, and oppression; and, gratefully, it doesn't really give answers.

Clint Howard. Inadequate, half-eaten hamburger. Giant, freaky centipede thing. Cockroaches everywhere. Abrasive, ambitious overachieving chick--everyone thinks she's a bitch and they're right. Her boyfriend thinks she's a fine piece of ass, and he's right. Giant cockroaches. Vomiting in the toilet. Spontaneous combustion. Lezzy, witchy bookstore owner--I've known a few of those. Rosemary's Baby-style coven. Fat naked guy with a nose-boner. Gratuitous violence to Clint Howard. Abdominal insect penetration. Insect-vomiting. Insect-crushing. Hideous adult birth scene. Resentful, man-hating women. Women who say, "But he's a man, what does his life matter?" Men who say, "Women belong in the kitchen!" Girls who say, "Get off of me! You're like a dog in heat!" Bad beer jokes. Lots of gooey stuff. Human sacrifice. The secretary from Moonlighting playing basically the same character. Body-morphing a la Videodrome. Flame-shooting arms. Combusting legs. Gratuitous violence to a bigot. They're burning Christmas. Judaism vs Christianity. Christianity vs Paganism. Apatheism wins. How quickly children forgive. And a little romance for the lady viewers.

Nekkid: 1/4
Gore: 2/4
Icky, gooey stuff: 4/4
Humour: 2.5/4 - come on, it's got Clint Howard.

Rottweiler (2004) - 2.5/4

Yuzna's killer dog film about an American in a European country who escapes prison and is pursued by the prison's cyborg dog. Probably the most ambitious killer dog film ever made. Not that the competition is fierce.

- Hero and dog are linked on some level, destined to destroy one another.
- The loss of the hero's girl and the robotic mechanism of the dog occurred together.
- The hero hallucinates the dog, making it a spectral sort of conscience, like Francis Thompson's Hound of Heaven. Jealousy, guilt, and guilt for jealousy.
- The chase itself is really just an excuse for a dark, even morbid picaresque romp involving thieves, drug dealers, whores, female rapists, flower-picking little girls, crazy industrialists, bounty hunters, and more.
- Symbolism of the fog as our fumbling toward a destiny we can't escape.
- Symbolism of the scorpion, the cruel sting of death we can't escape.
- Dystopian world with countries run by a crazy industrialist Paul Naschy.
- Privileged thrill-seekers trying to escape ennui by infiltrating forbidden nations, getting in over their heads. At least the ennui is gone.
- The game of infiltration: infiltrating the mind and soul.
- The progress of self-realization, as the hero flees the prison of ignorance and arrives on the open shores of understanding.
- The supernatural visions, omens, hallucinations that pervade the story like fog make the film more expressionistic than realistic.

Despite some of the silliness, cliche moments, stupid writing, and sometimes-CGI, sometimes-puppet, sometimes-real dog, Rottweiler is far better than any made-in-Spain evil-robot-dog-movie has any right to be.

Nekkid: 0/4 for dudes, 1.5/4 for the ladies
Gore: 2.5/4
People the dog kills for no good reason whatsoever: 8
Humour: 1.5/4

Beneath Still Waters (2005) - 2.5/4

Yuzna ever seems to be in Stuart Gordon's wake. First with the Re-Animator series, now with heading over to Spain and shooting a Lovecraftian evil town flick. Gordon made Dagon (2001) and Yuzna gives us Beneath Still Waters (2005). How does it stack up?

Screenwriting 101: deepen characters with tragic backstories; have the male and female confide their tragedies to one another in a moment that ends in a kiss; the tragic backstory must come back to haunt the hero in the climax. Monster left over from The Resurrected or Castle Freak. Very '90s feel here. Effeminate evil sorceror. Kid-killing. Kid-eating. Jaw-breaking. Tongue-eating (is that what he's doing?!). Evil book. Evil fire. Evil seaweed. Spooky flooded town. Chained up satanists. A-hole cop. Cute Spanish girl in bikini--is she legal or isn't she? is it right to wanna plough her or isn't it? Oh, her bimbo friend looks old enough, must be okay. But her mom is young and bangable too--what a conundrum. Botoxed-out reporter. Wet-suits a-plenty. Annoying kids a-plenty. Awkward melodramatic exits a-plenty. Awkward character exposition a-plenty. Frog. Two-headed deformity. Self-mutilation. Magic mutilation. Characters who sit around watching murders. Orgy time! Titties on cake! Cake on titties ("Frosted flakes")! Man-on-man dry humping! Spanking! Whipping! Attempted screwing! Riding! Stripping! Impromptu bondage! Pretty tame stuff from the guy who gave us Society. And a little romance for the lady viewers.

Nekkid: 1/4
Gore: 2.5/4
Number of times Marcia is pronounced Mar-SEE-uh: 8
Humour: 0.5/4

Three John A. Russo films:

John A. Russo, the other Night of the Living Dead guy--kind of the 'loser brother' to George A. Romero--has had an interesting and uneven film career. Let's have a look.

Midnight (1982) - 3/4

A girl runs away from home, hitchhikes with some dudes in a van, and becomes the captive of some backwoods Satanists. Will daddy come to the rescue in time?

Religious fanaticism. Drunken stepfather. Rapey stepfather. Rendered unconscious stepfather. Takin' to the road, 1960s roughie style--with one bag n' a gee-tar. Random sexual proposition. Nice guys in a van. Sensible black guy. Fun with shoplifting. Rejected chips!!!! Preacher with a long, boring story and a cute daughter. Good samaritanism. Campin' under the stars. Random racism. "White boy!" galore--that's more racism, isn't it? Yes, black racist. Fat, cackling hick--didn't Russo steal that from Just Before Dawn? Guy with tight, stuffed pants. Gratuitous frisbee game. Satanic rituals. Talkin' to dead mother. Girls in little dog cages--is it wrong I was turned on? Head removin'. Hippie shootin'. Girl slicin'. Preacher killin'. Hick shootin'. Body disposin'. Grocery stealin'. Christian prayin'. Hick burnin'. Hick clobberin'. Blood drinkin'. And a little romance for the lady viewers.

Kind of a summary of 1970s exploitation genres: Summa Exploitica.

Nekkid: Nein!
Gore: 2.5/4
Racists: 9
Humour: 1/4

Dark Craving (1991) - 3/4

A soft-spoken physician is burned as a vampire/witch for his experiments in curing diseases, helping people, not sleeping with his brother's slutty wife and similarly sinister activities. Centuries later he emerges from a landfill alive, well, naked, and a vampire with venomous saliva. He finds friends, enemies, romance, and despair in our strange, modern world.

Accusations of sorcery, like puss-drinkin'. Genteel vampire. Evil antique dealer. Naked guy emerges from a landfill. Not only is he a vampire, he's a no-good dirty Tory! Chat with a priest about fluid exchanges. Tom Savini weightlifting. Tom Savini shooting things. 1980s American thrash soundtrack. One of the most interesting explanations for vampirism I've ever heard: superstition and the accusations themselves have transformed an innocent, victimized man into the feared monster. Antique dealin'. Museum visitin'. Accidental little girl killin'. Bikini girl assaultin'. Saliva secretin'. Street thug killin'. Catholic confessin'. Inept vampirin'. Girl stalkin'. Vampire macin'. Vampire shootin'. Priest killin'. Needless backstory for police officer. Moon Unit. And a lot of romance for the lady viewers.

Nekkid: Just that vampire guy's ass.
Gore: 3/4 - Tom Savini
Useless information about minor characters: Lots.
Humour: 0.5/4

Santa Claws (1996) - 0.5/4

A boy murders his mother and her santa-suit-wearing fat boyfriend. The detective calls this "piss-poor behaviour", but the boy is allowed to roam free to become an adult and die-hard fan of scream queen Debbie Rochon (playing Brinke Stevens, basically). But who's gonna die hard? The men who are using, abusing, and trying to take away the lovely scream queen.

Debbie Rochon's titties. Camcorder cinematography a-plenty. Lots of hot girls showing titties and pussywillow. Milf titties. Hairy, old fat guy gropin' milf. Crazy scream queen fan. Lengthy discussion about what pathetic losers scream queen fans are. The glamorous life of a tittie photographer. Creepy neighbour no-one seems able to notice is extremely sketchy. Murder with tiny gardening hook that could barely pierce a half-inch of flesh. There is a santa costume at some point. Bitchy mother-in-law. Bitchy sister-in-law. Did you contact the divorce lawyer yet? Scream queens just get no respect. Makin' out with a mannequin. Nerd dream sequence. How many times are they gonna say Scream Queens' Naked Christmas? And a little romance for the lady viewers.

Nekkid: 2.5/4
Gore: 0.5/4
Times you think, "Russo should have known better": at least 50.
Humour: 0.5/4

Slumber Party Massacre II (1987) and the Sexual Mythology of the Slasher

The original Slumber Party Massacre (1982) was written by feminist and novelist Rita Mae Brown as a reflection on the genre's subtexts, a metafilm as it were: a juvenile fascination with nude women and sex, a nearly omnipotent and nearly motiveless killer, a phallic murder weapon, are all appropriated from the genre to point out the gender politics in the slasher film. Contrary to popular belief, Brown had not written a parody; the comedy was added in an extensive re-write by director Amy Holden Jones. Apparently not a feminist, Jones took the material and, to the best of her ability, played the subtextual structure as a tongue-in-cheek slasher. The result is an over-the-top instance of the slasher, the archetypal instance of the cheesy '80s slasher, not to be confused with moody '70s-style slashers like Black Christmas (1974), Halloween (1978), When a Stranger Calls (1979), and He Knows You're Alone (1980). The goggle-eyed killer earnestly drilling nubile young girls is too ridiculous to take entirely seriously and yet Brown's subtext shows through, or perhaps is helped by the comedy: this killer is a frighteningly aggressive male sexuality dead-set on drilling the nubile girls. The same goes for the gratuitous showering, girls who hide about as well as a four-year-old playing hide-and-go-seek with her grandparents in the nursing home, and dialogue gems like, "Hey, it's not the size of your mouth; it's what's in it that counts." All of it is a joke and simultaneously a statement on the psychosexual dynamics of the slasher film.

As the film is definitively neither thoughtful metafilm nor over-the-top cheese-fest, whether The Slumber Party Massacre is taken as one or the other is ultimately up to the viewer. Both possibilities resulted in sequels, curiously enough. Jim Wynorski's Sorority House Massacre II (1990) and Sorority House Massacre III (1990), confusingly sequels to The Slumber Party Massacre rather than Sorority House Massacre (1986), take the over-the-top qualities and push them into comically extreme territory. In the Sorority House Massacre sequels, the driller killer of The Slumber Party Massacre becomes a malevolent spirit capable of possession. He then terrorizes increasingly big-titted babes with decreasing skin-coverage. The comedy elements reach their peak when both the potential victims and the villain refuse to die, no matter how many bullets are sent into them. The Slumber Party Massacre sequels, on the other hand, written and directed by women, sided with Rita Mae Brown over Amy Holden Jones. Slumber Party Massacre III (1990) does so by making its killer a sexually impotent victim of childhood molestation. Slumber Party Massacre II is by far more interesting; the rest of this essay will be devoted to why.

The plot of Slumber Party Massacre II ostensibly picks up where The Slumber Party Massacre left off. In the aftermath of the tragic incident, one of the survivors is in a mental hospital and her sister, Courtney Bates (Crystal Bernard), is trying to hold her own life together. On top of her over-protective mother, she has to contend with a series of disturbing dreams partially remembrance of the harrowing ordeal and partially filled with gruesome imagery presided over by a leather-clad, rockabilly driller-killer. Once her mom allows her to attend a weekend in a friend's country home she begins to suspect the dreams are premonitions. Unfortunately--the plight of the seer--no-one heeds her concerns until it's too late. After a series of hallucinations that leave her friends thinking she's crazy, the rockabilly driller-killer emerges from her dreams and, all while rocking some killer tunes, slays her friends one-by-one with his guitar-drill.

What makes the film so interesting is Courtney's dreams. A throw-away line in the film explains that dreams are the subconscious mind's way of dealing with trauma. Dreams give the trauma some sort of order that makes sense in the pre-rational depths. For perhaps the first time in horror film history, we're treated to a sequel that seriously deals with the psychological aftermath of a trauma like seeing one's friends drilled to death by a maniac. The result is, then, a very peculiar slasher film that is itself entirely a damaged mind's way of dealing with the content of a previous slasher film: it's a meta-film, in short. This allows writer-director Deborah Brock to take her investigation of the gender politics and sexual dynamics in a slasher film much farther than Rita Mae Brown could.

Courtney's dreams take a dualistic form: although they're all sexual in nature, there are the positive sexual dreams and the negative sexual dreams. The positive, or good dreams are those centered on the sweet, handsome Matt, her desired boyfriend. He's always shirtless and engaging in some sport that emphasizes his muscularity, or smiling at her from a slight low angle--she's literally looking up to him, in both adoration and sexual submission. Whenever she dreams of getting closer to Matt, however, her dreams are invaded by the negative. The negative dreams are centered on the darkly handsome driller-killer, with his leather jacket, brylcreemed hair, and guitar with a drill in place of a fretbar. While he's killing her friends, most importantly Matt, he's pursuing her with misguidedly amorous intent, not unlike Pepe Le Pew. Where Matt represents a clean, pure female sexuality, fantasizing about the physical beauty of the sporty boy-next-door, the driller killer represents that darker female sexuality that is drawn to dangerous, sadomasochistic relationships. Matt's sexual aura is comprised of his physique, winning smile, and sports. The killer's sexual aura is comprised of rock n' roll, leather, sexual dancing, and violence.

There is clearly a relationship between Courtney's pure, one could say socially-sanctioned sexuality, and the violent sexuality that terrifies her. Whenever she begins to fantasize about Matt, the rocker intrudes. What this seems to suggest is that the ordeal she survived in the first Massacre has affected her ability to engage in a mutually satisfying sexual relationship; she instinctly transforms it into a sadomasochistic relationship. A slight twist on this point, she may just on some level perceive all male sexuality as destructive, all female sexuality as trapped in sadomasochism. In the first film, Courtney, still a young girl, witnessed a man sticking a phallic drill in nubile girls wearing skimpy clothes. This image seems to have impressed itself upon her as the only course sexuality can take. By the same token, she automatically punishes herself for her sexual desire. She seems unable to cope with a sexual desire that is as pleasurable for her as it is for the male.

At the level of fantasy, Courtney's negative dreams are much like bondage: an attempt to transfer what one fears into an environment one can control. While often viewed as a perversion, bondage is little different than a man with a fear of heights going skydiving. Courtney dreams of the rocker so she can, on a subconscious level, deal with her fear of her own sexuality impressed upon her from the first Massacre. As the fantasist of a rape fantasy doesn't really desire to be raped, Courtney doesn't really desire to be subject to the driller-killer's terrorism.

At the beginning of the film, Courtney is seemingly in control of these dreams. Like any dream, they run without explicit control. Yet she's cheerful and undisturbed as she eats her breakfast. Once she leaves home and sees a dead bird--just as in her dream--she begins to worry that she's lost control of her comforting fantasy. As the film goes on and sexuality begins to impinge upon her more and more, her hallucinations increase in frequency. After she overhears her friend having sex, she hallucinates her bathtub filled with blood and then her friend's head overtaken with a gushing zit. These are all revealed to be hallucinations, much to her relief and dismay.

(Note: Major Spoilers from here on.)
The turning point is when, finally, her dreamboy Matt takes her to bed. When her positive dream becomes a reality, so too does her negative dream. By allowing herself to engage in sexual pleasure, she releases the sadomasochistic fantasy into reality. The killer immediately drills through Matt, destroying Courtney's hope for a normal sexual relationship. He pursues Courtney through the house, singing his lines and performing sexualized rockabilly dances while terrorizing the girls. The editing becomes expressionistic, giving him little music videos. This shows he's in control; he's no longer a subconsciously contained fantasy, a safe exploration of danger and fear. Gradually he manages to drill through everyone until it's just he and Courtney.

For better or worse, Courtney is unable to embrace this aspect of her sexuality. The film doesn't make entirely clear where it stands on this subject and it is by no means self-evident. As noted, the sexuality Courtney has with Matt is a mutually satisfying one. One might therefore assume the film is against an abnormal and sadomasochistic sexuality. However, feminist filmmaking is characteristically against perceptions of what's normal or abnormal in sexuality. Matt is, after all, a very much socially sanctioned object of female desire. Perhaps the driller-killer represents a fear of her more adventurous sexual interests that ought to be embraced. At one point he states, "You and I are one until we go all the way." Courtney's sister (in her dreams), however, says, "Don't go all the way!" In the context of the genre, though, I would suggest that the film can be taken at face value. The driller-killer, in the lineage of slasher villains, is an essentially patriarchal force that exploits females and denies them the right to their own sexual pleasure. Feminist writers, like Carol Clover and Linda Williams, have made much of this, from the phallic choices of weapon (although, what weapon isn't phallic?) to the relentless pursuit of girls engaged in sexual behaviour and the ultimate survival of the virginal heroine. This was made more explicit in The Slumber Party Massacre than any prior slasher; and Slumber Party Massacre II makes it even more explicit, indeed, as I've been showing, the very central dynamic of the film.

The film's final shot, to some very disappointing but to us the most interesting of all, reveals the whole film to have been a dream. Valerie Bates is not the sister in the mental hospital, but rather Courtney herself. Suddenly that throw-away line about the mind dealing with trauma seems all the more relevant. Cowering in her hospital room, she imagines the driller killer piercing her room--a visual euphemism for penetrating her, of course--just as she's imagined all we've seen in the film. Had this not been the case, the fantasies of the ideal Matt could be chalked up to a reflection of reality. However, once we realize there is no Matt, we see he's a purely idealized vision of a young woman's sexual desires. He's infinitely attentive to her needs, impossibly handsome, and while talking on the phone wears nothing but cut-off jeans and poses like a poster boy. Brock, moreover, directs the film such that Matt is consistently represented in a dream-like manner, with strange, subjective shots of him looking into the camera.

The intrusions of the driller-killer are thus not just about sexuality. A normal sexuality is co-extensive with a normal life altogether, which the traumatic events of the first Massacre have prevented Courtney from enjoying. The sadomasochistic fantasy perverts not just her sexuality but her whole world. He destroys her friends, destroys her romantic dreams, destroys her boyfriend, till it's only him left in her world. Her final attempt to exorcise him from her dreams with fire is a failure. If the film represents her struggles at self-therapy, the therapy fails; she remains a frightened, broken girl in her hospital room.

Sexuality is central, however, because just as the events of the first film are contained within a highly sexualized slasher format, so Courtney's means of dealing with the events are themselves contained within a sexualized slasher--albeit from a notably more feminine point of view. Brock is able to engage, in this way, not only slasher genre tropes, but also criticisms of the genre. In her 1984 essay "When the Woman Looks," Linda Williams argued that any woman who dares to grant herself the privilege of desire in a horror film is punished with her own reflection in the monster, a creature of abnormal power, and simultaneously victimized by it. If this dynamic is what Courtney witnessed in The Slumber Party Massacre, she's now internalized the experience and is cursed to perpetually punish herself in her own dreams for exhibiting sexual desire. The first-person relishing of the beautiful Matt is an instance of female gaze, female desire enjoying the spectacle of a beautiful male. It's genuine and not salacious; it is, for once, female pleasure acknowledged in a slasher. For this Courtney punishes herself, having internalized the slasher dynamic.

Moreover, Carol J. Clover's 1987 essay, "Her Body, Himself," which Deborah Brock could conceivably have read prior to writing Slumber Party Massacre II, argues that the 'Final Girl' in the slasher film, the girl who survives the ordeal, is purged by her experience. The most self-denying of the female characters, virginal and serious, usually a tomboy, the Final Girl is stripped through the horrifying experience of any desire to seek out pleasure for herself. Courtney was already a Final Girl. In this film, she's dealing with the results of this purgation. As I've noted, Courtney punishes herself for fantasies of mutually satisfying relationships. These fantasies pervert themselves into sadomasochistic relationships with a primal male sexuality she can't control. In an instance of Freudian repetition, she's forever reenacting in her fantasies her own ordeal as a Final Girl, repeatedly purging herself of her healthy sexuality. But the purgation, in Brock's film, is itself extremely unhealthy and leaves the female with an unbalanced, pathological sexuality.

The film's message, if we may call it that, is not that women watching slashers will, like Courtney, internalize the sexual dynamic and become sexually unbalanced. Courtney witnessed the Massacre from inside, not safely projected on a screen or popped in a DVD player as we do. (Although the names of the characters--Bates, Voorhees, Krueger--suggests Courtney's watched her fair share of horror films.) But if slasher films are to some extent reflections of a social disorder, a disorder based upon repressing female sexual liberty, then Slumber Party Massacre II suggests the dangers of propagating such a disorder. Film is a very powerful medium and what viewers of that medium can and will assimilate would astound. Freedom of sexual desire is sexual health.

Wrong Turn (2003) - 2.5/4

Imagine you open your eyes and see before yourself a dog standing on a beach ball and being chased by a clown. Yes, you're at the circus; you'd just nodded off. Suddenly, in your drowse-inspired detachment, you're struck by the realization that the universe has been developing for billions of years according to unbending laws of physics so consistently, so unerring, so determinately that it could be said the entire universe has led up to this point: the clown and the dog on a ball. Granted countless other things are occurring in the universe simultaneously; but it did take billions of years for you to watch a dog on a ball. One can be extremely amused by the mock-epic implications; one can also be a little disappointed in the universe. It's such a trivial thing to spend billions of years working towards.

Fifteen minutes into Wrong Turn, I knew I'd feel a similar disappointment. The plot is simple: a doctor takes a shortcut through West Virginian woods to avoid a traffic jam, strikes an unexpectedly-placed SUV, and the whole group that goes looking for a phone is hunted by violent, inbred hillbilly cannibals. The moment I noticed three girls and two guys in the SUV group, I knew who would survive the film. But with that prediction (an accurate one) came this disappointment: that all the horror, violence, agony, death that occurs within the film does so just so the handsome, square-jawed man and the pretty, resourceful woman can 'get together.' This is the unspoken progression of the film. All the premises and how they work out leads to this conclusion: the handsome man and the pretty girl develop a romance.

I don't mean to imply Wrong Turn gives us pointless love scenes: it never does. But the film does conclude with the surviving pair together. It was predestined. The moment we spot Eliza Dushku, we realize she exists for the doctor and he for her. They're written that way. And everyone else, who should have a separate and meaningful-in-itself existence actually exists for these two to get together. The ordeal doesn't take on any symbolic implications for the implausibility of any two people coming together; it is concrete, particular, regarding these two people in this universe set up just for them. Because in the movies, pretty yuppies getting into a relationship is the most important thing in the universe. Hence my disappointment. Like the dog on the ball, to end the film on the predictable couple getting together and driving off into the sunset seems to trivialize all the came before; it trivializes the characters, the events, the horror all.

A more interesting though no less predictable film with a similar progression is House of Wax (2005). While that film also subordinates the existence of all other characters and all the events to the relationship of a brother and sister, it seems somehow more meaningful. Their relationship, for one, predates the events we witness and, while hardly well-developed, has a specificity to the characters. The relationship in Wrong Turn is entirely generic; it is, as I said, handsome man and pretty woman, but nothing more.

The said, the film offers some exciting chase action, including a siege on a fifty-feet-high watchtower and a battle in treetop branches. The success of these chase sequences depend very much on setting logic far aside. If Johnny is so inbred he can't learn spoken language, how likely is it he'll be a master archer or as nimble as Tarzan? These hillbillies should be club-footed special-care charges barely able to feed themselves. Yet, as is so often the case with the Hollywood depiction of hillbillies, the only parts damaged by inbreeding are the face and conscience. Amazingly proficient at anything physical, able to plan out sophisticated strategies, they are entirely incapable of moral reasoning. This is useful for creating a monster the yields thrilling suspense sequences, as when the protagonists hide in the monsters' lair, and chase sequences, as when the protagonists flee through the woods. But one wonders what else it's useful for. That is to say, what is accomplished on a social and psychological level by depicting hillbillies in this fashion?

The victims of hillbillies, from a genuine classic like Deliverance (1972) through cult classics like Just Before Dawn (1981) and Rituals (1977) on to Wrong Turn, are always middle- or upper-class and educated. In Rituals, they're all doctors. In Deliverance they're successful businessmen. In Wrong Turn one character is a doctor and the others all seem well-to-do. The hillbillies are, of course, living in poverty and without education. Were I to hazard a guess, I'd suggest that we, the predominantly middle-class and educated audience, are being confronted with two monsters of our world: the enormous failure our economical and educational systems to distribute goods justly over all; the possibility that education and success has made us weak and unable to fend for ourselves in situations of real danger. Hence the logic-defying physical capabilities of the hillbillies in Wrong Turn and trapping skills of the hillbillies in Rituals. When the hillbillies are finally beaten down by our cityfolk protagonists, we can return to the world at ease with our social and economic systems: the monster has been repressed again. If the extremity of the backwoods horror tropes in Wrong Turn are any indication, the repression has only exacerbated the situation. The hillbillies are Wrong Turn are more hideous, more heinous, more horrendous than in nearly any of its predecessors.

But I'm not here to preach social justice. Wrong Turn, for all its decadence, delivers on terror, even if it does show its hand a little too early and is, behind the gloss, a generic backwoods horror. Still, it would take a very uncooperative viewer not to cheer the film's final punchline, at least in his heart. If the universe has been following those unbending laws, maybe there is no such thing as a 'wrong turn.' This is how inbred hillbillies ought to be repressed.