In short: Innocent Prey (1984)

Cathy Wills (P.J. Soles) witnesses her husband Joe (Kit Taylor)murdering a prostitute. Because being married to a serial killer apparently isn’t a turn on for her, she helps folksy Dallas sheriff Baker (Martin Balsam) arrest him. Alas, Joe very quickly breaks out of one of those very low security “high security” establishments, and makes his way to kill Cathy. He doesn’t quite manage that, but ups his kill count by at least three cops and has some fun decoratively putting up a female cop head under great time pressure. And while Cathy escapes, Joe does so, too.

Sensibly, our heroine decides leaving Dallas for at least as long as Joe stays uncaught is a good idea. Fortunately, her friend Gwen (Susan Stenmark) has invited our heroine to stay with her in Australia, which seems a good bit away from Texas. Alas, once Cathy has arrived and starts to relax a little, she encounters another man of dubious sanity. Gwen’s neighbour and landlord Phillip (John Warnock) loves spying with hidden cameras, murder by electricity, and has rather interesting ideas about female purity. He’s obsessed with Cathy on first encounter. Because that’s not trouble enough, Joe has found out where she is hiding, and is beginning to make his way to Australia. Oh, and did I mention there seems to be something a little off about Rick (Grigor Taylor), the man Cathy feels drawn to?

I do tend to complain about overly constructed horror movies and thrillers, but I find it pretty difficult to resist the charms of this Australian example of the form directed by Colin Eggleston. It’s a very efficient film, packing two continents and two and a half psychos into a running time of less than ninety minutes, while still managing to sort of connect all the more or less nonsensical dots.

There’s a lot to love about the film: the contrast between Joe’s traditional slasher methods and Phillip’s ridiculous high tech as of 1984 oriented ways, how hilariously obvious the two (as well as the next one on the list) are as movie crazy people yet still manage to keep Cathy guessing for a bit, the exoticizing of Texas in Joe’s half of the film – it’s all very good fun.

When he puts his mind to it, Eggleston can actually compose a perfectly decent thriller sequence, as proven by Joe’s attack on his former home, which makes all the improbable ideas, the scenery chewing – particularly Warnock is a bizarre joy – and the dubious taste all the more delightful.

Candy Corn (2019)

1980. A trio of young men in a peaceful US small town has a very dubious Halloween tradition: beating up or otherwise abusing the developmentally challenged Jacob (Nate Chaney). This time around, they even bring guests in form of a girlfriend (Madison Russ) who isn’t at all happy about any of this and grown-up town asshole Gus (Sky Elobar). Oh, they – or really, mostly the ringleader, the local sheriff’s son Mike (Jimothy Beckholt) – also manage to kill Jacob this time around.

But don’t you worry, Jacob has been more or less adopted by the fall carnival that’s in town, and its leader, one Dr. Death (Pancho Molar) – or Lester, if you want to be prosaic – has just the right ritual for the occasion, bringing Jacob back as an undead avenger. You can imagine what’s going to happen, even though Mike’s dad the Sheriff (Courtney Gains) isn’t half bad for small town police in a horror movie.

Halloween-themed low budget horror movies are a dime a dozen now; most of them never find their way onto my blog because getting down on dreadful semi-professional productions is neither fun nor interesting to do (unless I find a movie truly annoying, or think it owes me for my time). Josh Hasty’s Candy Corn (or rather Josh Hasty’s Candy Corn going by the title credits, but I won’t) is actually a pleasant surprise in this regard.

It’s not a perfect film, suffering from the usual problems of its budget bracket. You probably know the drill: some of the actors in minor roles are less than ideal, there’s a bit of shooting around locations and crowds the film can’t afford to actually show all that much, the editing’s slightly off in some transitions – though acting and editing are otherwise at least fine, often better.

However, these are not problems that kill a film, at least not in my book, and Candy Corn does much more right than it does wrong in a lot of other respects. While there are quite a few nods to the genre traditions you’d expect a film like this to nod towards (starting with the title font looking right out of John Carpenter’s original Halloween), it is not the gore fest with no interest in its characters you’d imagine, but seems most interested in the impact of the deaths on the characters around them, spending quite a bit of time on the reaction of these small town cops who don’t usually even carry weapons to the murders, as well as showing many a scene of characters stunned by the aftermath of undead Jacob’s violence. Which actually does something rather interesting, turning this from a tale about a vengeance from the grave an audience can be emotionally satisfied by into one that’s more disquieting, a tale where everyone loses.


This interest in doing actual character work can also be seen in the way the film treats Dr. Death – in a fine performance by Moler - and his relationship to the other carnies (Tony Todd guest-stars as one, because he has been cursed by some eldritch abomination to be in every horror movie), portraying a guy who has been twisted by past bad experiences, and probably truly believes he’s doing the right thing, but also uses this emotional baggage to employ control over his peers. It’s all rather complex for what could be a very straightforward little slasher movie, and for my tastes, this added complexity makes up for the aforementioned flaws quite well.