Skinned Deep (2004) - 2.5/4

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is one helluva movie. Like the Hamlet of horror movies, if a movie goes anywhere near its subject matter, it does seem to be imitating it. Imitating The Texas Chainsaw Massacre isn't such a bad thing; just that its tones are so delicately balanced and ambiguous it'll be very easy to mess up. There's something darkly comedic about TCM, and yet it's never stupid or goofy. It's vicious and violent, yet strangely reticent to show you its ugliness. It's meaningful and satirical, a caricature and a portrait, but never self-consciously so, never blaring a message.

I could go on, but why bother? TCM is alive and making money still. Skinned Deep is an obscure and undeservedly neglected slasher in the TCM vein. Other films that tread the TCM territory, like Kevin Connor's Motel Hell and Hooper's own TCM2 both tried to play up the comedy and over-the-top feeling of TCM. Both films are excellent in their own right, if not as perfect as their template. Skinned Deep goes a country mile farther. This move is probably for the worse, but it sure results in a unique film.

Skinned Deep, much like TCM, concerns an odd 'family' that dwell together in a fiendishly eccentric house that is a small triumph of set design. This family similarly preys on stupid, American passers-by who happen into its traps. In this case, the Americans are ten times stupider, a family of fat fools who all but place their heads on the chopping block. This leaves the barely attractive teenaged daughter in the position of taking on the whole family herself. Fortunately she's under the protection of 'Brain' AKA 'Brian,' the family's childish but well-meaning sweetheart, with an enormous, skull-less brain and a single set of overalls.

The girl is dragged through one horrible situation after another as the family tries desperately--due to Brain's pleadings--to socialize her into the family. This involves some bizarre hijinks like a battle with a gang of decrepit bikers and the random murder of some joyriding rednecks. The film culminates in meeting 'The Creator,' a headless 1960s Sean Connery, flexing compulsively and speaking in riddles out of the ether.

I don't think there's any sense to Skinned Deep's absurdism. It's crazy for the sake of it. If you can't enjoy Warwick Davis as a plate-throwing midget that spews philosophy and does jinjitsu dances after every murder, a headless Sean Connery, a metal-jawed slasher called 'The Surgeon General,' and intentionally terrible dubbing, you've already missed the boat. It's strange and silly and you're supposed to like it for what it is.

As it happens, I liked it very much. But it's nevertheless a deeply flawed film. There is no seamless blending of tones like in TCM or even Motel Hell. The Surgeon General is a pure horror movie creature and as cool-looking as any slasher villain ever created, maybe cooler. The scenes involving him are often moments of pure horror, intended, it seems, with some seriousness. Then we see Brain prancing naked through crowded streets. There's no consistency, no clean segueing from tone to tone, just abrupt shifts from episode to episode or sometimes mid-episode.

All of this is lovingly filmed in a muddy 16mm that reminds of a good ol' HG Lewis movie. And the comedy in this movie probably comes closer to Lewis's sense of humor, incidentally. Skinned Deep has more in common with the insanity of The Gore Gore Girls and The Gruesome Twosome than Hooper's or Connor's subtlety. The shooting, however, is much better than anything Lewis ever did. There is a real sense for the tones of 16mm, particularly in the night shots, and an often brilliant use of abstraction rarely seen outside of Hitchcock.

Writer-director Gabriel Bartalos's next creation is Saint Bernard, another surreal, horror epic set for release sometime in 2014. I'm very eager.

Disconnected (1983) - 2.5/4

Phones are creepy. The proliferation of cellular phones today has transformed them into almost an extension of the body. I'm old enough to remember a world without cell phones. I'm old enough to remember rotary phones--and I ain't even that old, I'm just from a small town. In those days, the phone is this mysterious chunk of plastic you keep in your home where disembodied voices can access you at almost any time. Sure, it's usually your grandma asking if you remember where she put her purse. But sometimes that call at 3am could be someone you don't know, and you're permitting that stranger's voice to be in your home, to have access to your ear. Phones are creepy.

Disconnected is a movie that wouldn't work so well in the era of cellular phones. Something about those analog lines was different, both more personal and yet more otherworldly. Especially when we had no caller ID and couldn't google the number. The protagonist, Alicia, has a white rotary phone--a Model 500, I suppose--that starts ringing in with strange calls. As she recriminates her boyfriend for possibly screwing her twin sister, she hears her boyfriend talking to her sister over the phone. Thing is, neither her sister nor her boyfriend live with her and it's no party line.

Meanwhile, a serial killer has been murdering women and the police are desperate to find him. Just happens Alicia's rebound guy is none other than the slasher himself, a soft-spoken film buff who hits on her in the video store. These murders are remarkably bland affairs in which the effete film buff repeatedly sticks his embarrassingly small blade into dispassionate sluts. Including, eventually, Alicia's slutty twin herself, Barbara Ann.

What really makes Disconnected stand out is not Joe, the rude video store customer who leers at Alicia while asking about the latest porn releases. It's the weird phone calls. As the film's title indicates, the calls are 'disconnected' from the rest of the plot. Sort of.

The killer is shot by police halfway through the movie, leaving Alicia in a confused state she can only alleviate with chain smoking and binge drinking. We watch her 'downward spiral,' I guess, in a variety of indulgent montages that say, "Hey, I may have gone to film school." And I'd believe it. Gorman Bechard's direction is pretty assured for a debut slasher. Still, usually once the monster is dead, the movie ends.

That's the trick. The serial killer isn't really the monster. Alicia's mental state aside, she does continue to receive bizarre phone calls in which an alien voice growls gibberish at her. We also learn in passing that the serial murders are continuing, and all victims received harassing phone calls before they got it. Aha!

But then, just when you're intrigued about what's really going on, that's when Bechard decides to end the movie. And he ends it on a high note: with an old man leaving Alicia's apartment and walking away with his hands behind his back. Dun nun nuuun! That's actually the way the movie started. The old man asks to use her phone and is never seen again. What could it all mean? Only two people know: Gorman Bechard and Joe the porn afficianado--that's just my theory.

Disconnected is certainly one of the more peculiar slashers ever made. It's interesting, tries to be ambitious and subtle, fails miserably in the blood and tits departments, but succeeds in totally confusing everyone. That's a C+ in my book.

Pledge Night (1990) - 2/4

The slasher genre has a strange fixation on fraternities and sororities. I'm not sure why that is. They are a standard location to find a bunch of young adults and kill them. So there's that. Also, many slasher directors were using the AV room equipment at their college in between liberal arts courses. On the other hand, most of these slashers were made in the '80s. The '80s itself was kinda obsessed with the idea--whether being treated seriously or subverted--of fraternities and sororities as the building blocks of social success. In some way, these slashers were undermining the value of fraternities and sororities, presenting them as an extention of the poisonous teat upon which socially successful children must suck until they become full-blow sheep themselves. Rich, powerful sheep. Or maybe it's just because lots of douchebags, tits, and sex is likely to be there.

Pledge Night is even more fixated on the operations of the fraternity life than most slashers of the kind. The first half (yes, half) of the film follows the pledges through the process of initiation into Phi Upsilon Nu (That spells PhUN!). The way the 'officers' play with the pledges is scrutinized and the values they attempt to instill is presented clearly. The fraternity is all about loyalty and brotherhood. And the best way to make loyal brothers out of young men is to make them carry cherries with their perspiration-drenched buttocks for hours and then eat them. Straight out of Plato's Republic.

One pledge is a particular focus, as his mother is an old hippie who distrusts frats. Maybe she distrusts them less out of social protest and more out of, well, her ex-boyfriend was killed in a bad hazing incident in that very house. He was a well-meaning hippie named Joey Belladonna. I mean, Sid. Never saw it coming. But the pledge also got in with one of the officer's girls enough to know that the supposedly crazy frat member is all an act. Or is it?

Finally, just when you're starting to feel like you're being hazed by this movie, the frat exposition reaches climax during an exhausting monologue about the ancient history of PhUN. These frat guys really take themselves too seriously. Fortunately, the fake maniac becomes a real maniac and begins killing his 'brothers' while cackling with haemorrhoidal glee. But he's not just gone psychotic. He's been possessed by that hippie ghost, Acid Sid. Sid no longer believes in free love. He believes in asking people who they are, then killing them in gruesome ways. After crawling out of the frat brother's caved-in body, he strangles a pledge's with his own spinal column, melts another pledge's head in his vaginal gutwound, and chases the final guy and gal around the confusing frat house. They meanwhile hide in a secret room behind an American flag.

Yes, Pledge Night is a movie all about freedom and what America is really built on: rich, powerful families and the connections made in fraternities? or the human spirit that will never be satisfied as long as someone's oppressed? Neither. It's based on heavy metal, cheesy movies, and tittays. As Joey Belladonna sings in his epic ballad Efilnikcufecin, "Just one too many cookies/From the batch no one should taste." Or in Caught in a Mosh, "Your mother made a monster, now get the hell out of my house." Words to live by.