Notes from the Turkeyground III: A Month in Bad Movie Asylum

Yet again, the annual tradition of watching allegedly 'bad' movies dawned in our household. November 1st is eagerly anticipated like a harvest feast. We stockpile for it all year long. "We can save that movie for the Turkey Challenge!" So we do. It's the Saturnalia, the Carnival season, when all the checks and guards can be dropped and taste is turned on its head. The usual measures of taste, value, and pleasure are no longer so restricted. The gates are open and one never knows what will wander in. Movies that would seem a waste of time in June are, in November, a discovery, a gem, or just a damn good time.

This year, we knew what to kick off with. Those wacky SyFy movies, often produced by The Asylum, that just seem to be getting wackier all the time. There was always a tongue-in-cheek element to those giant shark movies, but they were still playing at being serious. That is, they were still about a giant shark or some other massive terror. I think, as they've come to realize they don't have to play serious, they've gotten better. They've given in to their worst impulses and that kind of perversion is always rewarded in a creative element. The best of these are directed by Griff Furst.

The anaugural film of the challenge this year was Furst's Ghost Shark, a film whose very concept is preposterous enough to amuse. It plays out almost as good as it should. A shark is assaulted by grenade-tossing rednecks, as all good sharks must be, and retreats to a semi-submerged druidic temple to die. The druidic powers that be make the shark not just a ghost, but a ghost that can materialize in any body of water, anywhere, no matter how small or shallow. The shark appears in puddles, cups, sweat, condensation, swimming pools, eating children, teens, more children, and a boardroom executive. This is what we waited all year for, and it was worth it. Thank you, Griff.

Furst also delivered in Arachnoquake, a severely underrated disaster flick about flame-breathing spiders and the all-girls softball team and the drunken tour bus driver that kick their bulbous asses. But he outdid himself with Ragin' Cajun Redneck Gators, where Louisianan yokels are chomped by gators with actual red necks and then themselves transform into angry, you could even say ragin', Cajun redneck gators. Such flagrant disregard for making sense deserves to be seen, however average the result. Hopefully Griff continues in this direction.

Next on the list was similar director, Mark Atkins, whose films are quite a bit more hit-and-miss, but also quite a bit more varied in style. His worst, Alien Origin, is an almost silent film, with a bunch of Filipino non-actors whispering in the jungle and the back of a restaurant with no music or special effects to speak of. His best, The Haunting of Winchester House, is a rehash of the same thing seen many times before, just done better than its larger-budget comparisons. Sand Sharks also deserves mention for its relentless goofiness, thanks largely to Corin Nemec's brilliant portrayal of a massive ahole into which all sharks must flow.

Unfortunately, as a dog that turns to lick its own feces, we returned to David DeCoteau for another try and got more of the same. In 1313: FrankenQueen we found very little Franken and even less Queen. A milfy scientist is supposedly conducting Frankensteinian experiments, but spends 20 minutes straight running a 'probe' (a dollar store flashlight) along one of the buff boys' half-naked body. The boys walk around in a trance a little. Then are merged into a single buff boy who kills her. But 1313: Giant Killer Bees! was totally different, a breath of fresh air, it was--just kidding, it was the same garbage with some bad CGI bees inserted into a few of the frames. DeCoteau's Hansel and Gretel: Warriors of Witchcraft, however, was a predictable, but entertaining private school drama with a playful witchcraft element. I'm assuming it was
ghost-directed.

At this point, we decided to return to Griff Furst and see what his earlier career had to offer. Swamp Shark proved a much more average 'ancient shark awakens from the deep and wreaks havoc' film. His take on the Richard Matheson classic, I Am Omega, starring Mark Decascos, was quite a lot of fun. Decascos unleashes his usual martial arts moves on some monstrous non-CGI creatures, hooks up with a city girl, kills some rednecks, and blows stuff up. The more independent film, 30 Days to Die--a title that describes nothing in the film, really--is a combination of serial killer slasher mayhem and women-in-prison flick, with a deranged sheriff running headfirst into a very mismanaged teen girls' juvenile rehabilitation camp, at times very dull and at the same time one of the month's highlights.

The third of our SyFy heroes was Steven Monroe, who provided us with the very entertaining Mongolian Death Worm, which used the wise technique of overstuffing the plot and making good use of its washed-up actor star, Sean Patrick Flannery, as a charming rogue. Monroe's Grave Halloween was a strange Japanese ghost story, set in a spooky forest. Although a great setting, as the only setting the forest provided highly monotonous to the point of sopor.

Unfortunately, not all SyFy directors are created equal. Leigh Scott offered up Flu Bird Horror, in which silly pterodactyls attack teen delinquents in the woods and spread a plague. These plots awkwardly converge with little satisfaction. The Possession of Gail Bowers, starring Griff Furst, was the average possession movie, copying all The Exorcist's moves. The film's vulgarity is what it really has going for it. Finally, Hillside Cannibals, which tries to be deep and anthropologically serious as well as grim and gory while ripping off The Hills Have Eyes ends up being tedious and shrill.

Relief from the SyFy movies came from the UK thanks to Jonathan Glendenning. His S.N.U.B! was a boring mix of Yes Minister without the comedy and unduly slow apocalyptic zombie film. Night Wolf was a little better, hiding the werewolf for far too long and giving us only irritating characters who never get naked. But Strippers vs. Werewolves, a goofy, playful, comic-booky splatter movie with lots of good gore and nudity delivered everything a b-movie ought to deliver and in abundance. Perhaps the most outstanding film of the whole month.

At last, we decided it was time to stop waiting and give Sharknado a try. Can it be as fun as the premise? Can it offer all the pleasures it should? Of course not. The premise is hilarious, but when it comes to stringing it into a plot and real humans, you're stuck taking it too seriously. It's impossible not to take that plot too seriously, as any seriousness is too much. It should only exist as a lost Monty Python skit. At any rate, Sharknado is still fun in its gleeful nonsense, particularly the skydiving climax that so eagerly pisses in Newton's face.

Having watched Sharknado, we had to give director Anthony Ferrante another shot. Hence Hansel and Gretel, a very enjoyable if often wilfully stupid backwoods slasher about a clan of cannibals. Dee Wallace is excellent as the madwoman at the heart of the cannibal mayhem. The Headless Horseman is also a very enjoyable SyFy movie about a backwoods town with an ancient curse. It delivers: a. sinister inbred yokels. b. an ancient curse. c. a malevolent spirit that steals people's heads. d. a pit to hell with little ghostly hands. and e. a sexy hillbilly with pigtails. Sharknado may just be the least of Ferrante's ouevre.

The last of the new directors we met this year was Dennis Devine and hoo boy this fella's a basket case. All of his movies are shot with three ingredients: a bunch of girls from the local college's acting class, a digital camcorder, and Randal Malone. He bakes them not so much to perfection, but to a bizarre, lumpy hodgepodge of catfights, bitchy comments, dark pasts, flashbacks, Agatha Christie style reveals, doughy bodies in bras and bikinis, and cheap stage blood. Yes, every Dennis Devine movie has a large number of cat fights. The most enjoyable part of each of these slashers must be Randal Malone's earnest delivery, used best in Don't Look in the Cellar. Alice in Murderland comes second, thanks to its cat fights, and last and least is Blood Mask, a confusing possession movie with braindead teens, priests, robes, and cheap goth makeup. I'm not sure how I feel about these movies, but I'm glad to have watched them.

Not much time, with all the new friends, to revisit our old buddies. I trekked through Fred Olen Ray's backyard on my own, enjoying my annual treat of Beverly Hills Vamp, and this year Fred's tna classics Evil Toons and Witch Academy. I also paid Steckler a 'What's up, dude?' by rewatching Blood Shack and The Hollywood Strangler Meets the Skid Row Slasher. But it was really Charles Band my wife and I spent the most time catching up with, enjoying the political incorrectness of Ooga Booga and the mindnumbing pleasures of the latest Evil Bong movie, Wrath of Bong. I'm not sure I know who Charles Band really is. He can make a brainless titty movie like Doll Graveyard, a heady French philosophy-referencing surrealist gem like Blood Dolls, and then a wacked out stoner-flick like Wrath of Bong. He's hard to peg. I just realized this.

I'm glad to say we closed out the year on Wrath of Bong and not the wretched Witchcraft movies we decided to try out. Overall it was a fine month of turkeys, where The Asylum scored a lot more hits than I would have ever imagined. Yet, a month where nothing mindblowingly great was discovered, and a lot of our new company proved little more than fleeting acquaintances. Most of all, I'm glad to have met Griff Furst, a gang of strippers and werewolves, crossed Mongolia with Sean Patrick Flannery as guide, and enjoyed the familiar comforts of Michelle Bauer's bosom and Eddie Deezen's flailing-hand emoting.

Until next year, stay hungry and hold the cranberry sauce.

A Guide to The Brotherhood Series

Introduction: A DeCoteau Primer

I have been convinced for some time that David DeCoteau's films are only as good as their screenplays. There are some directors who can take a weak, thinly-plotted, or uninteresting script and transform it into a very good film. These directors are artists. There are other directors who are merely competent and can ascend no farther than the quality of the text. They don't add or subtract much of anything. I am tempted to reduce DeCoteau to the latter category--were he not so puzzling to me! He's one of the most prolific directors in the world, very independent, has recognizable obsessions (particularly muscular young men in white underwear), and yet defies any efforts to consider him an auteur.

Let's look at what DeCoteau does bring to his films. He brings his oscellating dutch tilts, what we might call 'canoe cam' (he does have Canadian citizenship), or perhaps we could refer to the technique as 'flying dutchman.' Whatever it is, the technique has been in DeCoteau's repertoir for a long time and is used in nearly every film from the late '90s onward, most obsessively and memorably in Totem (1999). What DeCoteau is notorious for, however, is his insistance on featuring young men in white underwear. Several films blatantly display the young men frolicking in their underwear, rubbing themselves, indulging in gratuitous shower scenes in which they soaplessly rub their chests and abs for inordinately long periods of time. If this visual style varied with each film, were honed for interesting effect, we could call it an auteurist style. After all, DePalma's uses his split-screen technique as obsessively as DeCoteau's uses his canoe-cam. However, DePalma's split-screens always tell us more than what we're seeing; DeCoteau's canoe-cam just makes things wobbly and, yes, a little otherwordly. Nothing else.

A more subtle and, to my knowledge never critically-discussed feature of DeCoteau's work is an obsession with blandness. What seems like sheer narrative carelessness is so consistent in DeCoteau's work, regardless of the screenwriter, that it has to be a wilful trait of DeCoteau's. Every character in a DeCoteau film is cardboard, or worse, a silhouette of a cardboard cut-out. There's little distinction in depth amongst the characters; the distinction is rather one of affability. Perhaps this is why DeCoteau so consistently leaves us spend half the narrative with a set of characters, as though they were the protagonists, only to kill them whenever the monster or slasher shows up. His choices of 'protagonists' are often so counter-intuitive that he is either one of the most inept storytellers in cinematic history or he genuinely sees no important distinction between one character or another. The characters that stand out, are most interesting (which isn't saying much) and affable, are dispatched unceremoniously, while the blandest and least-developed of the characters, characters who get very little narrative time or are fairly unpleasant, very often survive to the end.

Ordinarily a filmmaker so committed to surface innocuousness is, as Robin Wood was arguing back in the '70s, on a subtler level subverting conventional norms. Look as one might into DeCoteau, however, and convention is rarely if ever subverted. DeCoteau's ideas of conventions may well have come from Revenge of the Nerds. There are jocks, nerds, preps and outsiders, and they all exist in their separate but colliding universes. Never in a DeCoteau film does anyone rise above his or her stereotype. That would require characterization. The weird, creepy outsider always does turn out to be weird, creepy and maybe even evil, as in Ancient Evil (1999). Turns out those jocks and cheerleaders were right! Of course they were; they're heroes. And the supercilious preps? Soul-stealing vampires, of course; just as we thought. Rarely has any filmmaker been so committed to, not merely using stereotypes, but upholding stereotypes and following the notion of their correctness to the bitter end. His narratives allow no opportunity for their subversion; the end for each character can be read clearly in the beginning of his films.

Perhaps, one might argue, that this is all a part of DeCoteau's worldview. He simply sees the world as a collection of boring stereotypes, the few moments of excitement provided by hunky men in white underwear or a friendly airhead. A pessimist, he thinks interesting, nice people are destined to die, and those with whom we form a bond will soon be snatched from us. Or perhaps, as I think is more likely, he rarely gets a good screenplay and when he does is more interested in a cheap production with a decent payout than making an entertaining film that'll earn a good payout. So he throws some pecs-and-bulge into a makeshift plot. Of course, were this an aspect of his style, it wouldn't be so bad: perhaps his auteurism is to be found in visual innovation, I'd ordinarily say. But, as argued above, he doesn't bring much visual style to his films either. What we're left with is a director with a few unvarying idiosyncrasies adapting whatever scripts with little contribution in terms of quality.

The Brotherhood series exemplifies this fact quite well. The series is bound together by a loose theme, namely the desire to be a part of something greater than oneself. Each film concerns the tensions amongst young men to join groups and yet remain individuals in some fashion, and each film begins on a new permutation of this notion. Each film, too, features some courtship by an individual or group to induct others into a group. Despite relatively similar IMDb ratings in the 2.5-3.5 range, the quality of each film in the series varies widely. (The generally low ratings can be attributed to the homoeroticism of DeCoteau's films. More on that later.) The fourth entry stands far above the rest of the series and the third entry is egregiously bad. Yet both are written by the same people--the puzzlement of DeCoteau's films continues. Did he have an off day or did the writers? As many DeCoteau films as I've seen, around two-dozen, I still find the man inscrutable. At any rate, I offer here brief, relatively shallow reviews of each Brotherhood film.

The Brotherhood (2001) - 3/4

The first, and one of the strongest, entries in the series, The Brotherhood concerns two very likable young college roommates, one a jock who actually isn't much of a joiner and the other a stereotype nerd who envies those who have the opportunity to be joiners. The jock attracts the attention of the leader of a frat, who decides he wants the jock's body. That is to say, he wants to steal the jock's soul and inhabit the body himself. As the jock is inducted deeper and deeper into the sinister frat, losing his affable personality in the process, his nerdy friend teams up with a sexy co-ed to rescue him.

What made this start to The Brotherhood series so strong is its reliance upon character-based drama rather than typical horror tropes. Though it does come down to bloodshed, the tensions are mostly worked out in dialogue and emotion. The characters could hardly be called deep, though they're more developed than DeCoteau's usual set of characters, developed to the point that their actions are consistent and we see a development in their psychologies. What is absent in depth is supplied in likability, as both of the protagonists are very likable and attractive.

The characters are explicit about the categories of 'jock' and 'nerd', but the 'jock' begins more interested in studying than partying. He takes to his nerd friend, who is curiously enough the leading exponent of the categories, and they form a loose fraternal relationship together. The intrusion of an attractive woman and the need to belong are ultimately dissatisfying alternatives to the brotherly bond of male friendship and the need to be one's own person.

The Brotherhood 2: Young Warlocks (2001) - 2.5/4

The themes of the first Brotherhood film are reworked, making the group not an exclusive set of privileged students, but rather a band of outsiders disliked by (most) other students and principal alike. Enter a new 'kid' with a proposal that amounts to a warlock pyramid scheme: he's been inducted by one warlock and received power; now he will induct them and give them power and he in turn gets even more power--if only they kill off a few people they hate. Unfortunately one of the outsiders, a cute twink with a crush on a jock's girl, has a conscience and faces the warlock's wrath.

Young Warlocks continues The Brotherhood's approach to horror by focusing on supernatural character drama that results logically enough in murders than in beginning with any fixed horror tropes. The 'jocks' are personality-less bullies who stalk the schoolgrounds looking for outsiders to bully. The young hero has tensions with fitting in on the one hand, and is becoming alienated from his friends for his reticence to join the warlock on the other. The drama isn't quite as good as in the first film, however, as the characters aren't as likable nor are their personalities nearly as developed.

As far as the 'goods' go, the young men aren't quite as attractive in this film as they are in the first. One of the jocks (Greg Lyczkowski) and the protagonist (Sean Farris) stand out, but we're usually left looking at the teutonic Forrest Cochran, a Cherub-faced Aryan who looks a good ten years older than everyone else in the highschool. Incidentally, that the film is set in a highschool makes enjoying the beefcake perhaps a little less comfortable than the college setting of the first film.

The Brotherhood III: Young Demons (2003) - 1/4

Easily the worst entry in the series, Young Demons abandons the Brotherhood formula (until now) of dealing with drama and instead goes the route of a cheap, poorly-paced supernatural slasher. A highschool student gets to use the school afterhours on weekends, where he prepares a roleplaying game, complete with LARPing, that anyone is welcome to participate in. This time, however, a man in a knight costume is actually killing the players. Fortunately a jock decides to play with the nerds this time, 'cause he wants in the level 6 elf mage's fire-resistant loincloth. So he can rescue the nerds, or at least a hot female nerd.

The action consists of the characters wandering the school while the knight randomly appears in a cloud of smoke and dispatches one student after another. These students have the thinnest of characterizations, ranging from 'friendly jock' to 'friendly nerd', or even to 'evil nerd.' They're present to be murdered and to wander around in underwear. So we don't care that the knight is dispatching them. All that's left to care about is that they're amusing or nice to look at, but they're not really either. Not even the LARPing, which one would think easy to ridicule, provides much amusement, as the mage has cast a Tolerance spell on the audience. Yes, some male students use the opportunity of falling in blood, for instance, to take a shower, rubbing their pecs and abs soaplessly for several minutes. Then they're murdered. Were the random, scarcely-diagetic beefcake particularly attractive, this might make the film enjoyable for studwatchers. However, they're not quite as aesthetically pleasing as they ought to be.

Where the other Brotherhood films provided drama and in that drama enough space from action and plot for beefcake setpieces and interesting moments, Young Demons is just devoid of that space. It forces a few such moments that are unsuccessful for reasons of unattractiveness and inappropriateness, but the Friday the 13th action is the dominant force in the film and that force is spectacularly uninteresting.

The Brotherhood IV: The Complex (2005) - 3.5/4

Somehow, following The Brotherhood III, DeCoteau and the same writers pull the series out of the muck with the best, most ambitious entry in the series. Leaving the usual settings DeCoteau inhabits--so he can re-use the locations, el cheapo--The Complex is set at a prestigious, private military college. The locations and props used for the film are attractive, complex, and interesting in their own right. Even more amazingly, they're inhabited by interesting characters and feature in a decent, well-paced story.

The plot concerns a child prodigy who, having reached college age, lands himself in the prestigious college just to please his naval officer dad. Unfortunately for him, as the Standard DeCoteau Opening--in which an attractive young man is pursued by a group of attractive men and killed in what amounts to a symbolic homosexual gangrape--reveals, there is something sinister afoot at the college. A secret society known as The Black Skulls have the whole complex in a grip of terror and are interested in inducting the young genius into their fold.

The 'child prodigy' could well have been an annoying character, but Sebastian Gacki has quite a lot of charm and succeeds in pulling the role off very well. The character is likable, intelligent, and does the job of protag-ing very well. The villains have a sufficiently interesting backstory to keep Gacki's character probing and the audience guessing until the end. However, it's the film's setting that elevates it and out of which its other virtues mostly arise, divided between a creepy, underground bunker and the sumptuous, mahogany-panelled main building of the college. A military strategy room and a nice bomb prop add to the film's more elaborate design. If DeCoteau splurged more often, The Brotherhood series may be better in general.

Of course, DeCoteau doesn't splurge because he aims for a common denominator, the target audience that will watch his films for the eyecandy. The Complex offers several moderately attractive young men in their underwear, naturally. It also offers a very sexy lady in hers, namely April Telek (the stripper from the "Pilot" episode of Millennium). While the eyecandy is good, one wishes DeCoteau would be this ambitious more often: eyecandy is always best enjoyed embedded in a good film, and The Complex is a good film.

The series's idea of joining and belonging receives its most complex treatment in this entry as well. Gacki's character has joined a naval academy, but is largely uninterested in joining the navy, let alone a secret society. Not only is he at odds with the secret society, but he's also at odds with a group of bullies that are themselves at odds with the secret society. Ultimately he has no real friends, no circle in which to belong; the film ends with Gacki embarking on a solitary quest to track down all the Black Skulls. Not only does he refuse their courtship and evade the symbolic rape (murder) that would follow his refusal, but he becomes the pursuer and they the victims. He's found his purpose as a decided anti-joiner, and individual of self-reliance to the end.

The Brotherhood V: Alumni (2009) - 2/4

With the title 'Alumni', I expected this episode to be a continuation of The Brotherhood IV. No such luck, however. In fact, Alumni scarcely even fits the theme of The Brotherhood, as it really has nothing to do with joining or fraternity; it simply happens to contain a group of youths, some of whom are male. Their being together is not a voluntary group. In fact, Alumni is a riff on the old I Know What You Did Last Summer plot. A group of high school seniors play a prank after the prom, leaving the prank's victim dead. Years later the whole group are summoned, not having seen each other in a long time, back to the school by mysterious notes. Soon their dark secrets bubble up while they're systematically killed.

We know how such a plot ends long before it does: one of the supposed victims must actually be related to the original victim and is getting revenge. The most interesting aspect of the film is that all of the characters had a perverse relationship of one sort or another with the victim; not necessarily sexual, just that they all hated him for one strange reason or another. Several seemingly inconsistent flashbacks of the murder and its aftermath punctuate the action, like a homoerotic b-movie Rashomon. But even this isn't terribly interesting, as we have no reason to care about these people or who's killing them. The only character worthy of any interest is Amy, a "large-boned" girl whose relative lack of dialogue gives her a mystical sort of otherworldliness, like she stands aloof from these characters and wishes she were in a film directed by Wes Craven instead.

If a DeCoteau film, as a rule, asks the audience to find pleasures outside of the plot, Alumni is a major failure. The setting is another uninteresting school (colleges and high schools abound in DeCoteau's filmography), whose architecture is only moderately distinctive. The eyecandy is decent, primarily on the homoerotic side. DeCoteau goes a little further in this film by providing a gay make-out scene between two attractive, buff guys.

The Brotherhood VI: Initiation (2009) - 2.5/4

The Brotherhood series returns to its roots in this entry, the last as of writing, to delve deeper into fraternity life. In this case, nearly every character, including the protagonist, are already in or trying to join a fraternity. So the tension isn't so much between joining or being an individual, but in maintaining one's individuality and dignity within a group. Because Initiation is all about an elaborate hazing ritual in which the initiates are subjected to two days of torment at a wilderness camp.

The main character is the son of the fraternity's founder. He loathes participating in the initiation, has no desire to be in a fraternity, but wants all the benefits a fraternity conveys. He doesn't seem like much of a party animal and he already has a girlfriend, so it's unclear what those benefits are supposed to be. Still, that's his thin motivation and he's sticking to it. While he arouses the ire of the frat leaders by mouthing off, they fret over a past initiate who disappeared after particularly cruel treatment. Then the killings start.

There's something exceptionally cheap-feeling about this entry, as though DeCoteau's budget were what he could find at the bottom of his cardigan pocket. Each time the killer readies to kill, moves, scratches an itch, or snaps a twig DeCoteau launches into a montage of the killer's eyes and hands--the same shots, over and over again. The setting, moreover, is pretty much an old shack in the woods and trees.

So what's DeCoteau to do? Amp up the eyecandy, of course! If Alumni suffered from too much plot and not enough extra-narrative material, Initiation corrects the wrong big time. The plot is as minimal as can be--a crazy guy in the woods is killing everyone--and the boys-in-tighty-whities motif is cranked up to 11. In this movie, DeCoteau doesn't just find a few choice setpieces for the boys--I wouldn't quite call them 'young men' this time--to rub their pecs and abs for a few minutes; no, he strips them in the first 15 minutes and never lets them put their clothes back on again for the whole movie. For nearly an hour these teenage boys run around the film set, by which I mean the woods DeCoteau rented for $10 a day, wearing nothing but their underwear and tennis shoes. They run in underwear, get hosed in underwear, flee in panic in underwear, get murdered in underwear, and sometimes even do some murdering themselves--in underwear. The idea is brilliant, but the execution really demanded studly men and not scrawny teenage boys.

Coda

So what do we learn from watching all The Brotherhood movies? There are some consistencies that seem to be a part of DeCoteau's worldview. DeCoteau never shows a positive side to joining. Being a part of a school, college, or fraternity is always innately dangerous. Joining subgroups within a school or college is even worse. Groups hunt, pursue their members, in elaborate courtship rituals. The frat leader of The Brotherhood, despite resistance from the jock, persists in the hunt, even overruling objections from his frat brothers. Victor Thanos in The Complex, similarly, will not take the rebuffs of Gacki's character and is willing to be insulted and humiliated while spinning his web to catch him. As Gacki makes a clear move of refusal, the only option left open is, instead of courtship, rape. Should one willingly submitting to the courter's partnership, it will culminate in a sort of death, becoming undead and without a will of one's own. Even the personality of the willing joiner alters. Should one refuse the courtship, the victim will be cornered by the group and killed, brought to death unwillingly. The willing partnership is the surrogate for sex in The Brotherhood series, and in all of DeCoteau's homoerotic films, because murder is clearly a surrogate of rape. So in DeCoteau, eros is really transmuted to thanatos; erotic love is conceivable only in death, entered willingly or forcefully. To join a group is always to be penetrated (in The Brotherhood, joining the group involves a pin-prick), to have one's individuality invaded, and with that to die.

Overall, the Brotherhood series has been devalued not just for its low budget but also for catering to a viewing audience that we still can't imagine as an ideal audience. I don't mean we can't imagine such an audience because we're homophobes, but because maybe there really is no ideal audience for DeCoteau's films. One wonders if treating men as eyecandy can ever have the same effect on women or gay men that treating women as eyecandy has on men. If certain feminist analyses are correct, the very notion of 'eyecandy' is patriarchal, and not a form of pleasure shared by women or gay men. On the other hand, I myself enjoy the aesthetic value of beautiful male bodies. But do I enjoy it in the same campy way we enjoy seeing Linnea Quigley do the Virgin Dance of the Double Chainsaws in Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers or the her naked tomb dance in Return of the Living Dead? We're invited, in these b-movies, to be salacious and to be slightly amused at ourselves for being so. I'm not sure where DeCoteau's tongue is, but it certainly isn't in his cheek when he has his boys prance around in underwear--except, perhaps, in Initiation. On the other hand, DeCoteau is too timid, or too cheap, to show us full-frontal male nudity, which makes what he is showing too tame for interested parties and too wild, or should I say too gay, for uninterested parties.

So DeCoteau has found an interesting niche in which he continues to labour, a niche he really began carving out with his early '80s feature Dreamaniac. But it's a niche that is consistently rated low partially by its own target audience and partially by an alternate audience looking for a laugh. It's a shame, because The Brotherhood and The Complex are both enjoyable and well-made low-budget horror movies. They have no ambition to be great indie films; they merely entertain as a cheesy '80s horror flick, like Slumber Party Massacre, might do. Were it not for the perceived homoeroticism of the films, they would certainly be rated higher. As it stands, they are viewed to be laughed at, camp against their will.

However, as evidence by The Brotherhood series, DeCoteau's concern for making the films good and fun for whomever he imagines his audience to be seems lacking. The films' quality diverges widely. Why is The Complex quite good while Alumni and Young Demons are quite awful? Did DeCoteau just happen to have a few extra bucks to spare? Did his screenwriters just luck out and write him a decent story? I don't know. But I want to make a challenge. Mr. DeCoteau, should you be reading this, I put it to you that with the budget and deadline you have for your films, I could make a more financially and critically successful, audience-pleasing film. And with half the budget and a longer shooting schedule, I'm confident I could do the same. You put up the budget, I'll give you a movie. What would that prove? Only that you, Mr. DeCoteau, could do better if only you cared more.

The Raven (2007) - 2/4

In David DeCoteau's two subsequent Poe adaptations, House of Usher (2008) and The Pit and the Pendulum (2009), I was impressed by how DeCoteau mined Poe's wealth of symbols for psychosexual horror. The best Poe adaptations have exploited Poe's symbols, from Jean Epstein through Roger Corman up to DeCoteau. Both of those films were written by Simon Savory, who lends the films a playful creativity. The Raven, which was written by DeCoteau himself, lacks that playfulness. Poe's source material provides not symbols with which to explore the subconscious, but merely some motifs with which to decorate a mostly unremarkable '90s-style slasher.

What is remarkable about The Raven is how its slasher qualities seem to be a development out of a certain kind of drama pushed to its extremity. This is not to say DeCoteau set out to make a drama and accidentally made a horror film. DeCoteau's niche is horror. Though the horror precedes the drama actually, logically the drama precedes and erupts into horror in The Raven. The kind of drama The Raven pushes is what be called the bitch drama. This is not intended to be facetious. Nor is it intended to single out females. A bitch drama is a drama that consists entirely in the escalation of bitchiness between at least two people. The setting is usually a college, prep school, or high school. Moral ambiguity thrives in the bitch drama, as most characters perform some morally censurable acts. The film Jawbreaker is a good instance of a bitch drama. The film revolves around the three most popular high school seniors covering up a case of involuntary manslaughter. As one of the three has a conscience and as an outsider discovers what they've done, increasing acts of bitchiness exchange, mostly from the hands of Rose McGowan's character. Election and Cruel Intentions offer different and more mature forms of bitch drama. The essence is cruel scheming amongst young, proud, passionate people.

The Raven, too, is a bitch drama, even a homosexual bitch drama. But to be more accurate, it is the aftermath of a bitch drama. What happens to people like the Rose McGowan character of Jawbreaker if they never receive any formal discipline for their actions? What happens if the bitch drama is not resolved, but merely buried and ignored? The neat wrap-ups of bitch dramas make of their conclusions a false bottom. The Raven concerns two unpleasant young men, Roderick and Drake, who had one such bitch drama in prep school. Then they moved on, hoping to part ways perhaps. By unfortunate coincidence, they end up at the same college. What was buried bubbles up more vindictive and violent than ever: the bitch drama festers into a slasher horror. The catalyst is Roderick's graduation party, a masque ball he's hosting at a mansion famous for having been the site of a massacre during a masque ball years ago. Drake believes Roderick is hosting the party as an insult to him, though we only figure out why near the end. Now guests at the mansion are being murdered by a man in a raven mask with a blade shaped like a raven's talons. So this is the culmination of the bitch drama. Drake wants to ruin Roderick's party and issues death threats; Roderick is throwing a macabre, sinister party to offend Drake. Where bitch dramas sometimes include a death, The Raven is far beyond that. The cruelty has become a compulsion to kill all. The climactic reveal is a reveal of a bitchiness of truly perverse extremes.

The manner in which the slasher plays out is, however, unremarkable. There is a limited collection of attractive young men and a single female to be dispatched. Their personalities are scarcely if at all distinguished. And the raven is a most efficient killer. The protracted and aestheticized violence found in Italian slashers is not present here. The raven dispatches of each victim with a slash or two before they even have an opportunity to try running. The longest setpiece is also the most explicitly Poe-related sequence. The raven plays a recording of "The Raven" on phonograph while rapping on the victim's door. The possibility of an elegant setpiece proves as much a tease as the sex scenes.

DeCoteau's approach to softcore sex scenes, incidentally, is to always climax with the semi-removal of underwear. At least one of the men in the scene will have the back of his underwear flipped down to reveal his buttocks, but the front remains covering the genitals. This maneuver replaces penetration and orgasm in DeCoteau's films. This is peculiar, because it is unlikely sexually active people would be satisfied with this maneuver when it is just as easy to remove the underwear. DeCoteau's sexual setpieces, just like his violence setpieces, seem to end too soon and never engage the possibilities they raise.

There is very little of Poe left in the film. The raven itself is transformed into a psychopathological artifact of guilt that manifests itself physically in the raven costume. If there's anything linking The Raven with DeCoteau's House of Usher, it's the use of Poe's writing as a remedy for a character's psychological damage. But where House of Usher captured the rich subconscious of Poe's writings, The Raven remains mostly superficial. When one adapts a short poem like "The Raven", screenwriting invention is a necessity, of course. But one would expect an adaptation of a poem to at least be poetic. The most poetic aspect of The Raven is in the art design including all of the mansion's decor, the raven's costume and weapon, and the lovely, gothic matte that serves as establishing shot. There is also some poetry and some Poe in giving the raven the last word: nevermore.

House of Usher (2008) - 3/4

David DeCoteau's House of Usher falls in a long tradition of "The Fall of the House of Usher"-adaptations. Jean Epstein's La chute de la maison Usher and Watson and Webber's The Fall of the House of Usher are both avant-garde classics that take advantage of the non-narrative aspects in Poe's writing. Roger Corman's House of Usher is a classic of horror cinema that follows Poe's narrative to mine its symbols for their psychoanalytic connotations. DeCoteau's Usher, written by Simon Savory, falls somewhere in between Corman's and Epstein's visions. DeCoteau's Usher is a deliberate attempt to put the potentially therapeutic nightmare of a psychologically damaged mind on screen, making narrative superficial and subordinate to the psychological symbolism.

It's worth looking at how DeCoteau's Usher is distinguished from previous adaptations. In Epstein's Usher, the visitor to the house of Usher is an elderly acquaintance of Roderick's who is not even named. He is merely a witness to the events surrounding the fall of the house. Complementing his role as witness is the variety of sensory malfunctions Epstein gives him: he uses an ear trumpet to hear and suffers presbyopia. He's not only a witness, but a bad witness to a distinctly Usher world. None of the visitor's personality enters that world, but his flaws of perception alter how we receive it. In Corman's Usher, the visitor is named and while he too is a witness to the Usher world, he's too indignant to witness it passively. He is not a friend of Roderick and in fact only meets him in the first act. It is rather with Madeline that he has a relationship, a romantic one as it happens. To save Madeline, he actively effects change in that world. In DeCoteau's Usher, the visitor, Victor Reynolds (Michael Cardelle), takes priority over the Ushers themselves. The world he enters is distinctly his nightmare and not a nightmare he has entered by accident. Not only are his senses sharp, but the Ushers tell one another that he has the power of "sight," a sort of psychic vision into the house's otherworldly aspects. His power of sight is not that of a detached observer, but of a creator. The house of Usher is a Reynolds world populated by Ushers.

So, where Corman was able to leave the supernaturalism of the house ambiguous and merely a manifestation of Roderick's troubled mind, DeCoteau doesn't have that recourse. There is no objective witness. If the house is a manifestation of a troubled mind, it is Reynolds's mind. However, it is also through Reynolds's mind that the whole film is seen. The house of DeCoteau's Usher really is a vampiric entity in symbiotic relationship with the Ushers. They and the house grow weaker until the house is able to consume victims. Thus is Reynolds summoned to the house in capacity as both saviour and victim of the Ushers. It is by Roderick (Frank Mentier) that Reynolds is invited, not merely an old friend but his former lover in a relationship that ended when he enlisted in the military. Both Roderick and Madeline (Jaimyse Haft) tell Reynolds in private how much he's needed, making his importance very clear; yet it is nebulous just why exactly he is important. While it initially seems he is there to liberate the Ushers from the house, they eventually decide he must be sacrificed. Their decision doesn't proceed so much from any narrative or character developments as much as by the dream logic at work.

The nightmare Reynolds finds himself in is interesting for being more sexual than violent. I referred to DeCoteau's The Pit and the Pendulum, made a year later, as a psychosexual horror. House of Usher, while not as pure, falls in the same category. On Reynolds's first night in the house, Roderick wastes no time stripping and making out with him for a few minutes. Reynolds ends the session when the moment of penetration comes dangerously near. He is molested by the hands of ghosts in a bathtub. He has visions of ghostly muscular men in underwear warning him to flee. Each of them were victims of the house, yes, but also of Roderick's camera. It is as if Roderick's look of sexual desire captured their souls. Madeline also attempts to seduce Reynolds with some ferocity, but falls into a cataleptic state before she can get his pants down to fellate him. It is as though Reynolds is forever approaching sexual moments, but being prevented or preventing himself from fulfilling them. Or rather he is being both tantalized and reproved with fruitless sexual relationships. Madeline is given a speech about a ghost child she believes haunts the house. It's not the ghost of a child that died, but the ghost of the potential child her barren womb can never realize, "For every woman there is a child waiting to be born," she says. This is an expression of conventional sexuality: the idea that we must "be fruitful and multiply." She adds, "I fear the unborn far more than I fear the dead." So both Roderick and Madeline are viewed as haunted, Roderick by male sexual conquests he's sacrificed to the house and Madeline by her infertility. Both are haunted, then, by their fruitlessness. Reynolds's importance to the Usher's therefore seems to be the possibility of fruitfulness, but ultimately the vampiric barrenness of Usher means he can only be a saviour through sacrifice.

Reynolds's sexual reticence and his status as sacrificial victim has mystical connotations. From early in the film he can be seen wearing a cross. Roderick draws explicit attention to it. His role as both saviour and victim makes him Christ-like. The Ushers, however, have a distinctly pagan quality. They must continue to sacrifice victims to the house. The relationship of Roderick and Madeline to the house is an interesting one. Despite their concern for Reynolds, they compulsively perform the sacrificial ritual. They have no fruitfulness outside of the destruction of others. Where Corman deliberately shot the exteriors for his Usher where there had recently been a forest fire, the grounds of DeCoteau's Usher contain a lovely garden. Madeline explains the garden is over the family burial grounds. There is no growth without death for the Ushers. But the house is insatiable. Their sacrifices must be endlessly repeated. They are held captive to it, but it's not clear why. Freud considered compulsive repetition to be a particularly destruction reaction to feelings of guilt. In this case, it is Reynolds's own feelings of guilt about his fruitless sexuality. One is reminded of how Pope John Paul II referred to birth control and pro-choice as a "culture of death." Reynolds is able to deny his own sexuality and project it onto the pagan, parasitic Ushers while he remains a Christ-like victim.

A distracting aspect of the film is that it's just a little too precious and fresh. The house itself is a newly-built modern manor. One would expect a grotesque and delapidated old mansion. It is implausible that this house is in the process of falling to pieces. The actors are also too young for the roles they are asked to portray, with the exception of Madeline's Jaimyse Haft, who gives the film's best performance. Roderick looks like he would still get carded at a pub. They are also all extraordinarily attractive. Even the butler and the ghosts are studly young men. I can't deny the pleasure of looking at these faces and bodies. It is an enjoyable part of the film, of course. But in DeCoteau's The Pit and the Pendulum there is a good reason for having only attractive people and the pleasure of looking at them integrates with the content of the film. In House of Usher, there is no internal reason for the attractive cast. Nor does the enjoyment of these bodies integrate with the film's content.

House of Usher is the second of DeCoteau's Poe films I've seen, though it was made before The Pit and the Pendulum. He also adapted The Raven in 2007, which I have yet to see. In the two I have seen, I've been impressed by DeCoteau's and Savory's experiments in sexualizing Poe's narratives. From the expressionistic and symbol-rich material of Poe's stories, they've created nightmares with which to explore psychosexual depths. The narrative-light content of Poe's stories allow the space to make such explorations. The Pit and the Pendulum is something of a masterpiece. House of Usher is not as sure-footed, but is still a fascinating psychosexual nightmare from which we might experience a little catharsis. In following its own unique path with the many permutations Poe's story permits, House of Usher proves a worthy entry in the grand tradition of House of Usher films.

The Pit and the Pendulum (2009) - 4/4

Poe this is not. But then, what Poe adaptation ever is? From Jean Epstein's La Chute de la maison Usher (1928) through Roger Corman's classic Poe films, Poe has been to cinema what he was to the Symbolist poets: a wealth of symbols with which to manifest the subconscious. David DeCoteau's The Pit and the Pendulum is perhaps the farthest of all incarnations from Poe's original narrative, but it falls in that same tradition of manifesting the subconscious.

Poe's "The Pit and the Pendulum" is a very short story about a man strapped beneath a bladed pendulum on a platform surrounded by pit. He reflects upon the mechanism as it swings gradually closer until he is rescued by soldiers in the last moment. Corman's The Pit and the Pendulum involves the mechanism, but locates it in the neglected family torture chamber around which the melodramatic story is constructed. DeCoteau's The Pit and the Pendulum just about dispenses with the mechanism altogether. The pendulum is a pocket watch in the hands of the mad hypnotist Jo-Beth Divay. She's experimenting with the permanent removal of all pain and fear through hypnosis. Unfortunately, her techniques involve causing extreme pain while under hypnosis. She leaves that part out of her ads, however, which promise superior physical performance in athletic endeavours. Hence the collection of beautiful bodies, both male and female, that submit to her experiments.

To some extent, the point of The Pit and the Pendulum is the enjoyment of beautiful bodies. A nearly five-minute scene of two exquisite male bodies wrestling in tight, black underwear makes this point clear. One of this men has a shaved head and larger muscles, whereas the other is more lithe and 'cute.' Another attractive man strips to his underwear to lift weights. He resembles a figure from an El Greco painting, elongated and darkly beautiful. The two gorgeous young ladies never strip, but their scant clothing and beautiful faces offer plenty to the eyes. One is a model blond beauty. The other is a porcelain-skinned redhead with one eye seemingly smaller than the other; the quirk, easily perceived as an imperfection, makes her all the more stunning. Jo Beth as well has a sophisticated beauty, not to mention cheekbones you could chop vegetables on. She strips down to just her panties and boots, offering a slightly older woman's tight, dainty body for display. There is also a callow blond man and his handsome suitor, both of whom can be seen in underwear. Their appearances are more boyish, particularly the blond. These people are nice to look at. They give visual pleasure. And all in different ways. There should be a body for everyone to appreciate in this cast. The connoisseur should appreciate them all. As they are all athletes, there is a good reason they are all toned. So one needn't feel manipulated. One is free to enjoy the forms.

The reason enjoying the bodies is important is because The Pit and the Pendulum is a psychosexual horror film that significantly involves taking pleasure in beautiful bodies. DeCoteau sublimates violence and horror into sexual pathology. The title of Poe's story, after all, can just as easily be able the female and male genitalia. The vagina is a pit and the penis is a pendulum. The young athletes of the film enjoy and appreciate one another's bodies as much as the audience. Just about everyone in the film "swings both ways" like a pendulum. In the two-day stay at Jo-Beth's manor, most do end up exploring at least one other person's body or expressing a desire to do so. The two young women engage each other sexually, two of the young men engage each other, and two other men get to have physical contact with the women. It is only Jo-Beth who is unable to enjoy the bodies. She is either absent or at a distance.

The vagina becomes a dangerous pit and the penis a dangerous pendulum only in the face of repression and oppression. Jo-Beth is trying to remove the experience of pain from her subjects and is herself unable to experience pain; but the experience of pain and the experience of pleasure are intimately linked. They are two sides of the pendulum. Jo-Beth thus becomes the monstrous center of the psychosexual horror. While she watches the muscular men wrestling, she begins to strip and fondle herself. She does so not out of enjoyment of the bodies or the erotic value of their grappling, but from the increasing violence and the potential for death. Her only sexual satisfaction comes from inflicting extreme pain in hypnotic sessions. She suffers from loneliness as she seeks a partner who can take infinite punishment, but finds there is no such being, no-one like her or no-one like she imagines herself to be at any rate. She is, in some sense, the patriarchal standard of female desire, without pleasure of her own; her desires are perceived as dangerous and destructive. As Linda Williams argued, horror films permit female desire only to "demonstrate how monstrous female desire can be." (1) At the same time, her sadism is a masochism. The fulfillment of her desire is co-extensive with the destruction of her desire. She desires most of all a man who is like her, but realizing that man destroys him. Her only pleasure is therefore in the destruction of her own potential source of pleasure. Denying herself gratification compulsively is the only means to gratification she has. It is an endless cycle of masochism and from the masochism comes the sadism.

Jo-Beth is a generally fascinating character. She's the only character really more than just body. Her personality is large, her subjects' small; her sexual persona dwarfs them. When they first meet her they line up in her den obediently, awaiting their turn to speak. One would expect these beautiful bodies to be totally confident, but they are strangely childlike before her, like Guildenstern and Rosenkrantz before Hamlet. Sexuality oozes from her as they do from a sexy schoolmistress. Her sexual energies dominate them. Yet she herself is unable to enjoy her own sexual potency except through sadism. She has a number of terrific monologues that reveal something of her depths, particularly a lollipop-aided speech about the glory of mechanical clocks and a discourse about cactii. Like Vincent Price in Corman's Poe films, she has these odd quirks, like collecting cactii and clocks. Though actress Lorielle New is not the thespian Vincent Price was, she has great screen presence and sexily channels Price in the peculiar role with success.

Besides Jo-Beth's monologue, the clock motif carries on throughout the film. Clock faces are superimposed over each hypnosis scene. Jo-Beth explains that each person has an interior pendulum, like the pendulum of a mechanical clock, that is continually moving one toward the pit of death. Poe's story is thus interpreted as not just about sex, but about mortality. Jo-Beth sees her project as being about conquering death, as if she can stop the internal pendulum and thus hold off the pit indefinitely. Many of the characters, moreover, engage in risk-taking behaviour, such as storm chasing; this is what in psychoanalytic terms is death drive behaviour. Sex is the recourse for immortality. While these beautiful people can and do have recourse in sex, Jo-Beth, only finds sexual gratification in death.

The hypnotism in The Pit and the Pendulum is also interesting in its own right. The mad hypnotist is a cinematic villain that goes back to the first horror film, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. Dr. Caligari himself keeps Cesare the Somnambulist in a perpetual hypnotic trance. Each adaptation of Trilby also includes the evil hypnotist Svengali. In Karl Freund's The Mummy, Imhotep uses hypnosis. In Preminger's noir thriller Whirlpool, Jose Ferrer plays a fiendish hypnotist. Pit, however, is the first film I've seen to postulate an out-of-body experience for the hypnotized subject. The 'soul' under hypnosis descends. We see the 'soul' walk downstairs, descend into some catacombs presumably beneath the manor. This may be the titular pit. It also gives the sense of a descent into the subconscious and a bubbling up of subconscious desires, uninhibited by moral concerns. Perhaps freedom from pain and fear is a sort soullessness.

If you want a straight-forward narrative, DeCoteau's The Pit and the Pendulum is not offering it. DeCoteau isn't even trying to give a classical narrative. An extremely prolific director, not unlike Takashi Miike and Jess Franco, he can afford to make offbeat titles as he has done with this screenplay from Simon Savory. The Pit and the Pendulum is a descent into the subconscious, into psychosexual terror. Had this film been made in the silent era, with only necessary dialogue and the offbeat monologues retained for intertitles, it would be regarded as a classic today. Made in 2009, it is a good example of what interesting work is being done in low-budget, independent horror.

(1) Linda Williams, "When the Woman Looks."

Talisman (1998)

The plot of Talisman is culled from a few sources, the most evident of which are Narciso Serrador's La Residencia and the Prophecy movies. The setting is La Residencia, but with all the genders swapped. It takes place in a strict boarding school for older boys/young men, where the obviously lesbian headmistress keeps her daughter from having contact with any of the boys. Enter new boy Elias Storm, who begins to notice strange things happening. As he investigates, he learns more about a mysterious talisman and it's role in opening the gateway to hell that will cause the end of the world.

If you've seen La Residencia, you can already guess who the villain is. It's just got a supernatural twist this time. Also if you've seen La Residencia, you can already smell the gender-related themes. I sometimes take cheap shots at subtextual criticism, but this is a case where it applies very well. The sexual tensions amongst the boys are just bubbling and the only girl in the school is dangled before them and, yep, killing them. (That's not a spoiler.) One of the boys, the most homoerotic of them all, is so vocal and obsessive about his desire to have sex with her that he becomes the least believable, like he has to constantly remind himself he wants her. Only the hero doesn't show any interest in her.

You often hear of a great idea with poor execution. Well this is a pretty wretched and typical late-90s supernatural horror idea given execution far better than it deserves. The interests and personality of Elias Storm are built up sufficiently for the climax to pay off and have a certain fluidity. The worldview of the villain, which she expresses at that point, is rather fascinating and totally amoral. I also liked the character of the head mistress, who says things like, "You're the worthless son of a wealthy family; and if one is going to be worthless, it is always a good idea to be wealthy." That is one well-phrased barb and Oana Stefanescu, whoever that is, delivers the line perfectly.

(I do have one complaint, and that's with the arithmetic of the scriptwriter. One character is supposed to be about two years older than another, who is 18. But the age of the older character is given as 16. So there's a mistake of four years there. It's not important, it just bugged me and I'm sort of proud of myself for catching it.)

Overall, this is a fairly mediocre late-90s supernatural horror and pretty much what you'd expect coming from Full Moon. I think of Full Moon as not unlike Hammer: you're assured a certain level of production quality when you watch their films, even if the ideas are often vapid. As to DeCoteau, he does give some of what he's become famous for: boys in their underwear. I wouldn't mind if the young men were better-looking--it's always nice to see beautiful things--but these men are callow and unappealing, save for one or two. So it's an average but decent b-movie.

Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-o-Rama (1988)

Three nerdy college boys--one of whom is way too good-looking to believe as a nerd--just wanted to watch a sorority hazing that involves spanking Brinke Stevens' sexy ass, when, having been caught, they found themselves forced to steal a trophy from the local bowling alley. Turns out that trophy contains an evil imp who uses his magic to turn some of the sorority girls into demons and all the others into, well, demonfodder.

These characters are all dopey and mostly '80s airheads. The late Robin Stille is the sadistic sorority president. She has two appearance-obsessed sidekicks who are actually the least attractive women in the movie--naturally they become the demons. One is deathly afraid of messing up her hair, but she has the most horrendous '80s hairstyle. The guys are mostly just horny bastards, with the exception of one very serious nerd who will of course be the hero. Linnea Quigley (over)plays the part of Spider, a thief they catch inside, who has a huge attitude problem--but deep down, there's a heart of gold only a nerd can bring out. The other women are just T&A. Oh, and there's a comic-relief janitor who worries about which hand to scratch his balls with.

DeCoteau knew how to deliver the goods, which makes me sort of uncomfortable. Because I know he's gay, that he's putting in all the 'goods' for straight men makes it feel manipulative, like he's throwing seed to pigeons; I'd much prefer if he could enjoy what he was showing us. But this lack of comfort doesn't last long, because he has some of the finest '80s horror girls to put in front of his camera, including Brinke Stevens, Linnea Quigley, and Michelle Bauer. Stevens and Bauer get spanked in their panties, smeared with whipped cream, shower naked (Brinke looking like some divinely beautiful forest nymph), and Bauer is magically made topless and horny until she becomes demonfodder. Linnea keeps clothed, but wears pants that might as well be painted on.

Despite all the fun, it seemed to be lacking something, something to tie it all together. The imp just wasn't mean or active enough, didn't have enough resources. There just wasn't really enough action to fill the runtime or location with; it seems spartan, somehow. Plus, even for a movie of this sort, the exposition scenes are pretty awkward. But still recommended for some funny, cheesy '80s tongue-in-cheek horror.