All I Want For Christmas Is...

You remember how I totally hated Elves?

I found a low-budget pun-tastic masterpiece that TOTALLY makes up for it!

In 2006, Jamie Nash and David Sckrabulis apparently OD'd on candy canes and nutmeg and gave us:

TWO FRONT TEETH!

OH.  MY.  GAWD!  This is HILARIOUS!!!

Gabe Snow, intrepid tabloid reporter, just fucking hates Christmas.  Seeing as how he accidentally killed his family with Christmas cookies, I guess he has a good reason.  SO, yeah.  His life just sucks.  It's the holiday season and he's chasing down the cause of the crash of flight 1225 (it had something to do with a flying creature with a red nose).  In the meantime, he's got a kinda crappy boss (who gives him a gun for Christmas... go fig...), a crappy car and a bitch of a wife who's cheating on him with a mall Santa... only not, because she's never actually had sex with the mall Santa.  She's still a raging bitch, though.

So, anyway, in the midst of leaving mall Santa with a delightful shade of  "Jack Frost" blue balls, they get attacked by elves.  Not crappy fuckin' puppets this time, either.  This guy:

Trust me.  This one doesn't like toys, pointy shoes or dentistry.

So, anyway, he grows a pair and goes home to confront his wife and finds that she's been tied up and her paramour has been beheaded and used as part of the train decor.  Now, he has to protect himself and his wife and friends from the elves, who are out to reclaim Rudolph's nose for use in strange and arcane things, and their master, the dreaded CLAUSFERATU! 

Yes, Virginia, there is a Clausferatu.

Those friends, by the way, include Gabe's new buddy, a duster-wearing gunsmith who knows the REAL meaning of Christmas, his boss (really?), and the rubber-clad, sword-swinging nuns, the Silent Knights.

Not kidding.

Now, while this movie is DEFINITELY better when seen through a haze of eggnog and hooch, for a microbudget, it's actually pretty damn good.  It's crazy as FUCK, what with it's complete adherence to Christmas puns and being interspersed with cheesy animation that's reminiscent of the Rankin-Bass holiday specials, but it's got good actors and, oddly, as chock full o'puns as it is, a great script.  You can kinda tell it was shot directly to digital which just adds to its charm and the special effects... aren't... special... but, still, they don't take away from the experience. 

Are there better holiday-themed horror movies?  Yes.  Are there better actors?  Yes.  Are any of them going to be more memorable than S&M-clad killer Elves that talk like they belong on the cover of the Necronomicon Ex Mortis and a goofy Mexican stand-off featuring fruitcake?

Absolutely not.  

If you can find this one, watch it.  Watch it HARD.  Be careful, though, it might get you sticky.

The Granddaddy of Them All

No Holiday Horror list would be complete without mention of everyone's favorite.  No film has created more controversy, had more imitators or fathered more clichés than 1978's John Carpenter masterpiece:

Halloween

With, at least according to critics at the time, a "duplicitous" style resembling Val Lewton, Brian De Palma and Alfred Hitchcock, a $300,000 budget and a relatively unknown lead actress named Jamie Lee Curtis, John Carpenter gave us the seminal slasher flick.

If you haven't seen this, SHAME ON YOU!

You all know the deal.  Michael Myers, who had killed most of his family while wearing a clown mask, escapes from the insane asylum to stalk his sister, Laurie, who's been adopted.  With him, he brings his own, personal nemesis, Dr. Loomis.  Lather.  Rinse.  Repeat for 7 sequels and 2 remakes.

Because everybody needs to be chased by a bald British gnome at some point in their life.

The sheer number of tropes that originated from this film are staggering.  This film single-handedly established that the killer is somewhat more than human, that babysitting is the most dangerous job on the planet and that sex and drugs are the leading cause of death among teenagers in horror films.  Seriously, if someone asks you to babysit, you'd better get some shit in writing first... like a rider allowing you to drop the kids and run at the first hint of danger and, oh, I don't know... your will.

A self-defense course couldn't hurt, either.

Write it off as a business expense.

Now, I know what you're going to say.  "Didn't Black Christmas already establish some of these?"

Yes and no.  These things (other than babysitting) were present in Black Christmas but the "cause and effect" parallels weren't there.  In Black Christmas, there didn't seem to be any kind of rhyme or reason to the killing.  In Halloween, we seem to get a kind of instant karma.  You see kids doing bad things, you see kids die.  It's a thing.

One thing that I find to be incredibly cool about this movie is that, much like Texas Chainsaw Massacre, there's minimal gore.  The idea of gore is there but this film relied on suspense, silence and some darn good music (y'know... when there wasn't silence...) to generate fear in the audience.  The fact that we spent a lot of the movie actually watching through Michael's eyes (yet another trope borrowed from Black Christmas, but refined and used in a much more effective way since Michael never made a sound) is enough to get our inner Shanaynay yelling at the stupid white woman on the screen to get out of the damn way. 

A little bit of trivia:  For those of you that are not aware, Jamie Lee Curtis was not the first choice to play Laurie Strode.  That was supposed to be Anne Lockhart, daughter of June Lockhart, but Carpenter ultimately cast Ms. Curtis because of her mother, Janet Leigh.  Psycho was a huge influence in this film.

And their hair is FABULOUS!

The same cannot be said of that abortion of a remake.  I do not want half of the damn movie to be backstory for the killer, I want murder and mayhem.  You, Rob Zombie, of ALL people, should get that.  I don't want to feel sympathy for evil, I want to feel fear of it. Plus, your wife SERIOUSLY needs to eat a damn sammich.

If you haven't seen this film you can just consider yourself looked at funny.  I don't even KNOW you, anymore. 

What are you waiting for?  Go!  Shoo!  Watch the movie!

Proper Date Attire

In the midst of the Slasher Renaissance of the early 80s, a film emerged that received a LOT of hype.  This film... was Canadian.  And that bothers me, somehow.

My Bloody Valentine.

Our neighbors to the North gave us this movie.  I KNOW!  I'm shocked, too!

My Bloody Valentine.  NOTORIOUS for having 9 minutes edited out by the MPAA for excessive violence/gore.  Came from Canada.  Mind.  Blown.  That's like acknowledging the existence of Canadian Hip-Hop.  We KNOW it's there, but nobody wants to touch it.  Eeeeeeew.

So, anyway, rather than risk getting mauled by angry Quebecois and drowned in a vat of cheese curds and gravy, let's continue.

The movie starts with a couple of miners.  In an attempt to make mining gear look sexy, one of the miners turns out to be *AUDIBLE GASP* a GIRL!  (Note:  the management acknowledges that girls can be miners.)  So, apparently, in a misogynistic attempt to nip that girl-mining thing in the bud, her partner impales her on a pick-axe.  There's really no other reason for it at this point in the movie.

Because every woman dreams of underwires and lace under mining gear.

The town of Valentine's Bluff is then seen preparing for a Valentine's Day dance because small towns in Canada really have nothing better to do than prepare for parties.  While they do so, we get vague allusions to past tragedy and learn that this is the first one they've had in quite some time.  I'm assuming this is because the town has been suffering from the great Poutine famine of the 60s and 70s.

Enter  Harry Warden, the guy that got caught in a mining explosion 20 years ago.  He was left alive but unhinged and in protest killed a couple of  supervisors and tore out their hearts and left them in Valentine's candy boxes.  Because that's really the best way to air your grievances about a Workers' Comp claim in a country that has socialized medicine.

It looks a LITTLE like chocolate...

And then we get the "teenaged main characters" exposition while somebody gets another heart in a box (presumably "Inappropriately Dressed Girl's" from the opener).  Seriously, dude?  Still not the best way to get your point across.  HA!  "Point"...

Long story short, a lot of people die badly at the end of a pick-axe while avoiding saying the words "about" and "boat" and everybody assumes it's this Harry Warden guy.  It isn't.

As much as I tease, this is actually one of the classics of the slasher genre and I like it a lot.  It has a fairly in-depth plot and good acting.  Their choice of Sydney Mines, Nova Scotia was perfect for filming in (and saved them TONS of funny-colored "money" in terms of building sets since they actually filmed in the mines, themselves) and the twist at the end, while somewhat expected, is still relatively shocking.  And, now that the 9 minutes that were cut have been restored, no collection is complete without it.

Just wear gloves.  You don't know where it's been.

I KID!  I HEART CANADA! 

Ich Bin Ein Moron

Thi...

I...

Whu...

ELVES! 

What the FUCK did I just watch?

I mean, I saw Dan Haggerty and said "Grizzly Adams... this could be interesting" and then my world fell apart.

This is not a happy man, all beardy and cute, with a gentle bear friend and an avuncular, suede-covered fat man following him for no reason.  This is a failed Mall Santa.  This is what led him to officiating a wedding at the Bunny Ranch in Nevada.  This is the cinematic equivalent of meth addiction and it's sad.  SAD, I tell you!

There's a story, here, really... somewhere... and it goes a little like this:

The Nazis are planning global domination via a superhuman half-elf born to a (previously) virgin child of incest.  (OH!  Before I go further, I should tell you that there are no "elves" in Elves.  It's "elf".  Singular.  And more than that, it's a shitty hand-puppet in a damn Santa hat.  Much as I love puppets, this one hurt my soul.)

So, anyway, the deal is that one of the soldiers has to have a child via incest (because that makes the BEST breeding stock) that has to fuck an elf.

No, I'm not sure you heard that right.  The soldier has to father a child through incest.  This child then has to grow up and bone.  An ELF!

Specifically, THIS elf.

Even taking into account the elf in question, we all know that incest is not exactly the best route to evolutionary advancement.

So, 16 years pass by and the teenage-incest-daughter and some friends decide to pretend to be all Wiccan or pagan or satanic or whatever and they accidentally summon the elf.  Enter failed mall Santa, Dan Haggerty, who must then help the, apparently, suicidally stupid teenage-incest-daughter defeat the elf and her father/grandfather.

Yes, this song makes more sense to me, now...

Now, I'm all about making the Nazis look like the idiotic tools they were (and are, if you count the current Pope), but this goes beyond idiotic straight into the realm of  "My brain hurts."

Run away from this faster than a French border guard with new track shoes and a coupon for cigarettes.

Nipping at Your Nose

Sorry for the delay, kids.  Mitigating circumstances and all that.

ANYWAY!  Let's get right to work, shall we?

It seems to me that the mid-to-late 90s hated horror movie fans and the 1996 Michael Cooney schlockfest Jack Frost is example numero uno.

Yes, kids, the holiday season now has its very own magic snowman WITHOUT the benefit of Jimmy Durante and a silk top hat.   Oh, wait.  Did I say "magic"?  I meant mutant... as in "teenage" and "ninja turtles" complete with teratogen agent.

Yes, yes, dictionary purists, I know that "teratogenic" generally refers to developing fetuses BUT consider the root.  "Terato-" is Greek for "monster".

FYI:  This is from the Michael Keaton comedy of the same name.

Still freaked out by the talking snowman. 

So, anyway, the murderer dude, who actually IS named Jack Frost (thank you, booze-soaked failed Hollywood writers), is being transported for execution (natch) when the transport vehicle gets into an accident with a tanker containing genetic material.  Jack gets free of the wreckage but in the process gets doused with whatever genetic acid this crap is and is basically melted into the snow.

The sheriff, who is all "I can't rest until I know this guy is gone" and "Billy, have you ever seen a grown man naked" to his obviously challenged son who can't cook OR deliver lines to save his life and, later, gets accused of murder, gets all rightly paranoid about Frost not being... y'know... actually dead.

 Look... Daddy, I... Made... youthe... William Shatner Special...

Aaaaaaaaaand, the rest is just a collection of the worst winter puns you and a first-grader can come up with.

Barring this movie's OBVIOUS comedic appeal, which, by the way, is pretty fuckin' magical, if you want to be SCARED, you should probably leave this one alone.  No, no.  If you MUST watch this film, watch it because it is quite possibly one of the best unintentionally hilarious films ever made, much like Mommie Dearest and Showgirls (which was a cinematic MASTERPIECE of "Oh, God, I didn't mean for that to be funny").

And when I say "unintentionally hilarious", I mean "they wrote this to be a comedy but what they wrote ain't the funny shit".

Plus, for all you American Pie fans, Here's Shannon Elizabeth being raped to death by a snowman.

And his carrot nose grew three sizes that day.

This movie is maybe not at the top of the "so bad it's fucking amazing" heap, but it's still a hell of a lot fun to heckle.

You guys should totally rent this for a tacky Christmas sweater party!  It goes great with eggnog!

Blue Diamonds, Purple Horseshoes, Red Hearts

The lengths to which greed will drive us are almost infinite.

The depths to which horror movies will sink ARE infinite and that's kinda why I like them.

Today we take a trip to wee Ireland and slap ourselves in the face with bad brogue and twisted fairy tales.

Yes, kids, we're looking at St. Patrick's Day with Leprechaun and ye should thank yer lucky stars I'm not diggin' any further into yon franchise because "In Da Hood" was just bloody feckin' awful.

So, in this one, Dude O'Stereotype finds leprechaun's gold and takes it back to America with him.  Dude O' Stereotype dies of a stroke trying to keep leprechaun away from gold but leprechaun is stuck in a box thanks to its four-leaf clover kryptonite.  Fast forward to where Dad buys the house Dude died in and Girly MacComplain-y-pants bitches incessantly about having to spend the summer with her father amongst the sand and tarantulas and is basically our entire set-up for a big moral lesson about how money just isn't all that important.  Enter giant, strapping painter with not-quite-flowing Fabio hair who reminds us, again, that money is less important than a sincere apology.

Did Mr. Rogers write this?

So, anyway, we're then introduced to painter-dude's little brother and their benevolent handi-capable buddy and our cast is complete.


Then they find the crate and the trouble begins seeing as how benevolent handi-capable buddy brushes the clover off the crate.

Also?  Timmy fell down the well.

Awesome.

So, now that the titular leprechaun is free, he can cause a whole lot of trouble, especially since little brother and benevolent handi-capable now have some of the leprechaun's gold.  And BHC swallowed it so it's there for AT LEAST 12-24 hours.

I'll tell you what, though.  As much of a wall of fromage this movie is, it's actually not bad.  It has that "made-for-TV" quality to it that a lot of late-80's-to-mid-90s horror movies possess but that doesn't take away from the wickedness of it.  The pogo-stick scene alone makes it worth it.  The movie is actually fun to watch and spins the supernatural slasher nicely.  It's a hell of a lot better than Wishmaster, anyway.

Boingy-Boingy-Boingy...

At the VERY least, it marks a decent start to Jennifer Aniston's career.  Of course, now that she's not doing the horizontal mambo with Brad Pitt, we don't see her that much, anymore.

I kinda miss her.

Yeah, she's done some good stuff, recently, but I would kinda like to see her more.

The world needs more sassy, aging Valley girls with awesome hair.

Jelly Beans

In the annuls of holiday horror, none stands brighter than Easter Bunny, Kill! Kill!

And by "brighter" I mean "I have never been more offended in my life".

It starts with an overacted robbery in an Easter bunny mask, which, all things considered, was probably the best and most easily understood scene in the whole movie.

THIS?  Makes sense.

Moving on, we now have the youngest mother of an adult (16... HA!) special needs kid EVER telling her badly acted adult special needs kid that she's got a date who shows up with bad Wolverine hair and cheesy porn 'stache wearing the Easter bunny mask from the robbery and gives him a blood-stained chocolate bunny and proceeds to tell the b.a.a.s.n.k. that a bad kid ripped the ears off of the Easter bunny which, effectively, ruins the kid's whole day because this kid LIVES for Easter seeing as how his dad died on Easter ten years ago.

Then a hobo gives b.a.a.s.n.k. a rabbit and b.a.a.s.n.k walks in on mom and new guy having sex which just causes a whole lot of OTHER problems like discovering that b.a.a.s.n.k. learned a few choice curse words from the gardener.  New guy walks in on kid and his new rabbit and proceeds to use the rabbit as blackmail.

Then Mom has to work a double shift and leaves the kid in the care of the new guy who invites over Pedo Pete who happens to have hookers, blow, cash and a taste for handicapped kids.

New guy is a bad egg.  HA!

And this is just in the first 20 minutes.

They improvised a SONG about hookers and cocaine, for Pete's sake!  Ray, the nelly pedomonster, comes with a briefcase filled with drugs and dildos AND he seriously needs a manicure.  Also, film makers, THANKS FOR THE NEGATIVE STEREOTYPE, ASSHOLES!

PAINFUL!  Painful and just fucking wrong.

But then the fun starts.  Knives and drills and a different Easter Bunny mask, oh, my.

Yeah, it still doesn't help.

I really don't have anything else to say.  This movie is an insult to just about everybody on the planet. 

Including hookers and pedophiles.

Skip it.

Curly Wooden Shoes and Spite

QUICK!

What's the first thing you think of when you hear "Amsterdam"?

I bet it's pot, isn't it?

And I'm pretty sure there was a LOT of it smoked when the script for Saint was written.

It seems that the Dutch are into horror films in a BIG way and this is just the tip of the iceberg.  Of course, we also know they're big into tulips and prostitution so I'm not quite sure what to make of this revelation.

Let's take a look at some cultural differences so this movie will make a little more sense, shall we?

First off, their holiday season is almost literally a season.  Sinterklaas or Sint Nicolaas supposedly arrives on a steamboat with his Zwarte Piets (Black Petes, their equivalent of elves AND Krampus combined and the reason "black face comedy" will never be dead) in the Netherlands on the 14th of November to make his initial sweep and take any naughty kids back to Spain.  Why Spain?  Because the remains of the actual Saint Nicholas are kept in Bari, which was part of the Spanish Kingdom of Naples.  Also because in Spain, St. Nicholas is the patron saint of sailors.  That and I'm pretty sure they're put to work in the lace and sequin mines and forced to make matador pants for eternity.

300 children died in a freak Point de Gaze cave-in to make this outfit.

The celebration continues on to December 5th which is the Feast of Sinterklaas.  This is where we get our cultural image of kids leaving out their wooden shoes in order to collect candy and possibly a fungal infection.  It's important to know, though, that Sinterklaas doesn't generally leave anything larger than candy.  Mostly that's the family part.  Beyond that, the party continues until Christmas.  So, the Dutch get THREE holidays instead of one.

Where do I sign up?

So... this movie.  Apparently, all of the above is still correct but if the fifth of December falls on a full moon Sinterklaas is a stone-cold thug what with the maiming and the murdering and the oy, geflavin and he's all burnt up and zombie-like because a couple hundred years ago, the living St. Nick was all with the raping and pillaging and the citizens of Amsterdam got all uppity about it and set fire to his ship with him and all of his Black Petes on it.

Now, every 32 years, this stuff happens again a la The Fog only without Adrienne Barbeau's magnificent rack.  (In fact, there are no boobs in this one.  Sorry, teenage boys looking for surreptitious thrills.)  ONE MAN knows the shameful past and ONE MAN can save Amsterdam from a Saint gone crazy.  Of course, no one believes him.  Enter the current crop of young adults that get sucked into the mayhem.

I think this one is a heck of a lot of fun.  Sure, it's kinda predictable but it's got that Kung-Fu Theater bad dubbing thing going for it plus it's not quite your standard slasher.  The body count is moderate but there's still plenty of gore and we can always make fun of another culture's racism while blindly ignoring our own.  How jolly!

Make it a Dutch party with marzipan and chocolate and gingerbread and hash.

Not Nice

For the second time this month, I'm covering a remake as well as the original.  This, I hope, will not be a regular occurrence.  But it probably will be.  Dammit.

Anyway... Silent Night, Deadly Night, as mentioned previously, is a controversial cult horror classic.

Silent Night, the remake, is, most definitely, not.

I won't lie.  I heard they were remaking/psuedo-sequeling this one and a squee was heard 'round the world.

I fear the squee was misplaced for Jayson Rothwell and Stephen C. Miller should both meet a sockful of nickels repeatedly and in rapid succession then be fed to angry Japanese hornets.  You know... those 3-inch-long fuckers.

Run, bitches.

Ze story, she go like zis:

Small-town cop is afraid she can't do her job.  She kind of hates Christmas because we're not sure why but it involves her going to church before work.  Her dad used to be a cop and he caught a spree killer wearing a Santa suit and a flame-thrower and we believe that has something to do with it.  So, anyway, this small Wisconsin town has a serial killer in a Santa suit, now, and it's her job to stop him.  She is not getting any help because, as in all horror movies, authority figures are fucking useless and her boss, played by Malcolm McDowell, seems to only be interested in gnawing on the scenery.

Of course, he's never been known for "subtle".

Don't get me wrong.  I never expected it to be an Oscar™ winner.  What I DID expect, what with it starring Malcolm McDowall and Jaime King, was some decent acting.  I expected a cleaner update.  I expected not to be confused and wondering what the hell just happened.  I expected it to be darker and edgier but not so dark as to completely strip the humor out of it.  I expected to be entertained and, dammit, I wasn't.

And, you know what I expected above all?  I expected to know, without a shadow of a doubt, whether or not this was a remake or a sequel.  I mean, it had a few awesome moments, like the antlers, that are definitely a call-back but above all, this was a half-assed attempt at a brand-new story.  A lackluster "Hero's Tale" to make Jaime King's character realize that, dammit, she WAS a good cop and she's gonna GET this guy to make up for all of her past failings because SHE FUCKED UP, dammit and she admits to it and she's gonna MAKE IT RIGHT, BY GAWD!

Gimme a fuckin' break.

Seriously?  Watch this for the brat and the cattle-prod, the porn star in the wood chipper, the antlers and the gently bouncing fakeys above them and Donal Logue getting a faceful of brass knuckles.  

Other than that, this movie can go silently to Hell.

I Miss You, EC Comics.

OK, so, this one TECHNICALLY isn't a full-feature about Christmas but 1972's Tales From the Crypt has to be mentioned.

As we all know, I kinda dig creepy anthology movies and this classic Amicus Productions shocker HAS to be mentioned because, you know, it's AWESOME and because of the very first segment, "...And All Through the House".

So, the wraparound story goes like this:  A bunch of tourists being led through British catacombs get separated from the larger group (about the same time as Joan Collins notices her missing brooch which so conveniently happens to be where she's standing even though she walked a good ten feet into the frame before noticing it was missing) and come across the Crypt Keeper (who is not a dust covered hand-puppet this time and actually more closely resembles the Vault Keeper who wore a hood in the comics while the Crypt Keeper did not).  He gets to tell all of them how they'll die.

YAY!!

But not all cute-like.

So, ANYWAY, the reason this one gets a holiday nod is because in Britain nobody put up a fuss when they put a killer in a Santa Suit into a horror film.  Because the British are awesome like that.

"...And All Through the House" finds our perennial "Into the mud, scum-queen" favorite, Joan Collins, being stalked by said mistletoe maniac but she can't really call the police.  See, she's just killed her husband for the insurance money and hasn't disposed of the body, yet.  Why she did this with her young daughter in the house is completely beyond me, but there you have it.  (Also, why she did it in a room almost completely furnished in white is beyond me, too, but I figure that she's allowed to be a little dumb pre-Dynasty.)  

Are Santa's eyes supposed to look like he's been mainlining gingerbread?

She does, eventually, get to make her husband's death look like an accident but completely forgets about the asshole in the Santa suit who's terrorizing her.  Her Christmas obsessed daughter, who, apparently, never got the "Get your ass in bed or Santa will never come" shout from downstairs where parents are feverishly wrapping or assembling presents and will continue to do so until the ass-crack of dawn when the kids will wake up and demolish the living room to the delight of everyone except the people who'll have to clean it up afterward, is awake and not in bed... and she let Santa in.

I happen to LOVE this movie because it's all Hammer-Horror-like, except without the costume porn.  Amicus studios and Hammer studios did share a distinctive style and the films of both are often confused.  It doesn't help that they share stars like Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing.  Here's a little tip.  Amicus films tend to take place during the "present" while Hammer Horror is generally period pieces.

All of this being said, I, PERSONALLY, think that the HBO series Tales From the Crypt and Robert Zemeckis did a MUCH better job using "...And All Through the House" as the second episode.  There was just more depth to it.  This does not, in any way, diminish my enjoyment of seeing Joan Collins get badly strangled, though.

He Loves Me, He Wants Me Dead...

In today's installment of Holiday Horrors, we look at St. Valentine's Day.  A day celebrated through the  sending of notes with "hearts" (which are actually representative of a woman's butt or, turned upside down, boobs), flowers (which, considering the number of Allegra D commercials I see every year, should probably stay in the shop or come hermetically sealed in Saran Wrap) and candy (and since I live in the fattest state in the fattest country in the world, we should probably do something about that).

It's also a day celebrated with chubby, winged humanoids with angelic faces that fire arrows willy-nilly without regards to who's going to get hurt.  And it is with THAT image that I bring you today's review:

2001's David Boreanaz vehicle, Valentine.

This is another of those "high school nerd seeks revenge" films that are SO cheesy but SO fun.  In this one, David Boreanaz (who gets top billing only due to his Buffy status), Denise Richards, Jessica Capshaw and Marley Shelton get to go on a spirited romp through slasher town with a killer that really loves to send threatening cards, candy with bugs in it and otherwise harass our successful young adult (Really?  No teenagers this time?  That's a first.) gaggle of girlfriends to death through Valentine's Day trappings and nosebleeds.

Yes, dammit, this is a fetish, too.   Fucking rule 34.

Trivia note:  Katherine Heigle and Jessica Capshaw were to work together again on Grey's Anatomy, not for very long, mind you, because Heigle left Grey's Anatomy after season 6, much like this movie where they never actually saw each other because Heigle was the first one killed and she hadn't spoken to the other characters in person.  This was Valentine's shout out to Scream, by the way.  Woo.  

It's a standard whodunit mystery plot.  There's nothing supernatural going on here.  Just a dude in a Cupid mask who gets nosebleeds.  You have your standard group of victims: the grown-up fat kid, the doctor (in-training), the girl who's always looking for a date and the "completely aware of what she's doing and not putting up with your slut-shaming shenanigans" sexually-generous girl.

Denise Richard's hottest face to date.  Drowning sex doll.  

Also?  Fuck you, Dr. Christmas Jones.

There's really not a lot to tell, here.  It's a popcorn flick and not much more than that.  I mean, yeah, it's fun and the twists are there but they're kind of boilerplate.  I do like that it's more Agatha Christie than Leatherface, though.  It makes for a nice change.

OH!  And before I go, I would like to bring everyone's attention to one of my favorite character actresses, Jessica Cauffiel.  She is ALWAYS amazingly funny and plays the perfect airhead.  She needs to be working way more often than she does.

Not that anyone important reads this thing.  Trust me, we all know that this blog is a big ol' vanity project.

LOVE MEEEEEEEE!

OK, I'm done now.

It's STILL SLIMMING! Gawd.

Sorry about yesterday, kids.  Due to circumstances beyond my control, I got lazy and didn't want to hunt down a computer.  Today, though, to make up for it, there will be an extra long post.  First, as promised, is the review of the 2006 remake of Black Christmas.

I know a lot of you kind of hate remakes and I don't blame you BUT, and this is a big but (much like my own), they aren't always a bad thing.  We'll discuss that later.

Let's get started, shall we?

In 2006, I was recovering from a serious downturn in my life and I spent a LOT of time at theaters alone.  To the point where I actually LEFT a holiday party to go and see this on opening night.  I had been looking forward to it for a while, ya see, and I often forewent social niceties in favor of me time.  For anyone that knew me, then, I'm very, very sorry.

In any case, I really think that instead of calling this "Black Christmas", they should have called it "Let's see how many times Lacey Chabert and Michelle Trachtenberg can drop the F-bomb in a misguided effort to drop their cutesy-wootsey little sister TV images".  Beyond that, though, it was a lot of fun.

Fuck you, and fuck you and especially fuck you.  Merry Fuckin' Christmas.
Also?  Andrea Martin After: With Decent Hairstylist Kung-Fu Grip

So the premise is about the same except they streamlined it for a modern audience.  Nobody's concerned about an abortion and there's absolutely no ambiguity about who the killer is/killers are.  There's none of this pussyfooting around with "is it the boyfriend or isn't it", we actually have a legitimate outside force.  HOORAY!  

Enter Billy Lenz.  The physically and sexually abused (and very possibly jaundiced) former occupant of the house AND his (also jaundiced) sister/daughter Alice.  

Better watch out.  He LOVES Christmas.

Y'see, Billy really likes the holidays.  No, wait... he actually kind of doesn't.  His alcoholic mother killed his father on Christmas.  Then his alcoholic mother tried to kill him but, like any well-prepared boy of the mid-80s, he already had hiding spots in the walls and attic so he lived there for quite some time.  And then, one Christmas, his mom gave him a very SPECIAL Christmas gift.  Her meat flaps.  Because mom was all about keeping it in the family and she wanted another kid that her current husband couldn't give her.  Pay no attention to the fact that she was at LEAST in her late 40s at this point (or at least she looked like it).

And this was after she killed the FIRST husband... girl is OLD!

After years of this (at least to the point of his sister/daughter turning 8 or so, Billy finally wigs and kills everybody (except Alice, whom people THOUGHT he killed but he didn't) and he gets caught making christmas cookies out of his mom's beef-jerky-like skin.  Personally, I didn't think cookie cutters were that sharp but we're talking about a kid that lived VOLUNTARILY all People Under The Stairs style for over a decade.

So, anyway, Billy, in true b-movie fashion, stabs his guard at the insane asylum (what exactly are we calling those now?  Not sanitariums... mental health facilities?  Why does being PC have to be so fucking wordy?) with a candy cane he sucked sharp (and who didn't do THAT as a kid) and takes off for home.  

Let the wild rumpus start!!

It's pretty standard slasher fare from here on out.  Killer in strange wardrobe goes about killing sorority girls (for fans of the original, the plastic bag and the unicorn are kept in... YAY).  Slasher ultimately gets killed.  Daughter of slasher survives to take over the family business after saying that all of the dead people are her family now...  OK, so it's not standard but at LEAST we get to see Andrea Martin get impaled with an icicle.

Oddly, though, the sex trope I told you about?  Inverted here.  None of the girls but one are shown having sex and it's the one who not only has sex, but her boyfriend taped it and posted it online, that survives.

So, anyway, this one is a little jumbled but it's not NEARLY the cluster that the original was.  I recommend this one for your holiday enjoyment.

Now... as mentioned previously, we're going to talk about remakes.

I have gotten into some DAMN heated arguments about remakes and all I have to say about that is this.

Opinions are like assholes.  Everybody's got one.

Seriously.  If the studios weren't in this business to actually make money, we wouldn't be having this conversation right now.  That being said, they know that horror has a built in audience and that a lot of the movies we consider to be classics sometimes really do need a facelift.  Some movies just do not age well and our grindhouse favorites are among the most needy.

Let's do this, Hennenlotter.

See, here's the thing.  Remakes are made to make money on a franchise and to maintain copyright on original characters, we know this, but, often times, the director assigned to helm the remake still has a passion for horror and knows and respects the original for what it is.  These directors are the "best-friend-step-parent" of fandom.  They know they will not replace our original favorites but they want to build a NEW relationship with a whole new generation of fans who, I'm sorry to say, will likely NOT enjoy the original, particularly in the case of some of the older fare such as Texas Chainsaw or even Black Christmas.

We didn't grow up in the age of the MTV quick cut edit.  We had to have patience in our film-making and had to sit through sometimes MINUTES of unnecessary exposition.  Heavens.  Poor us.  But don't hate the younger audience for enjoying what is in their nature to enjoy.  That's like hating a dog for being able to lick its own nuts.  Rather we should continue to enjoy the originals and try to view the remakes as separate entities.  (Of course, this is barring those remakes that are shot-for-shot updates, like The Hills Have Eyes.  Those kind of scream "COMPARE US!") 

If the remakes suck, call them out on it but there's no reason to say "remakes suck" just for the sake of them being a remake.

That being said, where the fuck is my big-budget remake of Frankenhooker?!?

I want it NOW!

My name is Veruca Salt and I approve this message.

It's Slimming, Dammit!

Today we're gonna try something a little new.

Today, we're going to review an original while tomorrow we'll look at the remake.

That being said, one of my favorite holiday horror movies is Black Christmas.

Don't be misled by the poster shown above.  That's just Warner Bros. stepping in and changing the title for the US theatrical release like dumbasses.

Anyway, this 1974 holiday hootenanny is kind of iconic as one of the first slasher exploitation films.  (Not taking into account Peeping Tom, Psycho, any of the Hershell Gordon Lewis splatter films and any Italian Giallo films, of course.)  The difference here is that in the 60s, for the first time film taboos had relaxed to the point that nudity, gore and shock techniques could be used readily, and they were.  So, here we are in 1974 with Margot Kidder, Olivia Hussy and Andrea Martin getting stalked by a psycho in their sorority house.

 Andrea Martin: Before, now with bad perm action!

Bad fashion choices aside, this slow burn of a  flick most definitely falls into the "The Call Is Coming From Inside The House" variety.  It seems to have been written specifically with that urban legend in mind and used a recent set of Canadian murders as a loose basis for a plot.

Loose is the appropriate word, here because the original title was called Stop Me and it was half typewritten and half written on tear-soaked bar napkins by Roy Moore (I assume... the internet can only tell me so much).  Since he died in 1980 and was never interviewed about the movie, we can only be thankful that it wasn't smeared onto a bleak hotel room's wall in his own feces.  Bob Clark did what he could to salvage it and I think he did a darn good job.

There's really not a lot of plot going on here.  Psycho killer on the loose.  Girls in sorority house.  Hey, I have a plastic bag handy.  Look, a pretty unicorn I can go stabby-stabby with.  Oh, the main character wants to have an abortion?  Let's screw with her.  How may voices can I make over the telephone?  How far can we push Margot Kidder before she completely snaps?

This is why they put warnings on bags, now.

The people most likely to hurt themselves with them can't read them.

The world is fucking stupid.

Now, from a cinematic standpoint, this does have some mystery and suspense to it.  Bob Clark may not be the best director in the world but he has some idea of what he's doing.  If you haven't seen this one, color me surprised because it's not like it's not 40 years old, or anything.

Back when smoking was allowed in sorority houses... and during pregnancy.

 

A couple of nifty tidbits:  Originally the role of Mrs. Mac was offered to Bette Davis, the role of Peter was offered to Malcolm McDowall and Gilda Radner was offered the part of Phyllis Carlson.  Also, the studio wanted Clark to change the ending so that it did not leave the story ambiguous but Clark refused.

I know there have been a ton of different college courses taught about this movie alone to analyze it from a feminist standpoint but I'm not sure it needs to be studied that closely.  It's a good movie and that's all that matters.

Tomorrow?  The 2006 version.  Be afraid.

Mamaaaaaa, Just Killed A Man...

Ah, Mother's Day.

The day when our mom's would LOVE to be pampered and spoiled (but will really just settle for breakfast in bed (which she will not eat because toddlers aren't allowed near the stove for a reason) and us going outside for more than an hour at a time). 

Or, if you're Lloyd and Charles Kaufman, the day where scary hillbilly mothers send their children out to rape and murder.  Of course, that's EVERY day to Troma films.  And, seriously, this is the entirety of the plot, barring the three girls that go all Rambo to protect themselves.

You would think, coming from the studio best known for The Toxic Avenger, that this would be one of the worst movies ever made.

SURPRISE!!!

Butt-Sex

It's actually a decent movie.

I mean, it's obviously b-grade but considering that this is the 80s and we're smack in the middle of the era of girls all talking alike, the script and the acting are not bad at all.  They're just bad enough to make the entire movie hilarious, but the movie isn't at all painful to watch.

And it looks like Lloyd coughed up enough cash to make this a decent production.  We're not talking about the standard Troma "Sony Handi-Cams and Duct Tape" productions that we usually get.  They actually TRIED and sometimes it really is the thought that counts.

My mom taught me that.

She didn't teach me how to keep my mouth shut, but she taught me that the thought counts.

I love my mother but damn.  Really?

Sass only gets you so far, Mom.

Isn't He Jewish?

When you hear the name "Bill Goldberg", Christmas does not immediately come to mind.

A wrestling ring, a lack of pants and a couple cans of whipped cream, maybe, but not Christmas.

David Steiman and Brett Ratner, on the other hand, decided to present us with this holiday tale of blood, gore and good, old-fashioned, barely disguised Jewish disdain of Christian holidays with Santa's Slay.

You would THINK that this would be just AWFUL, but any movie that STARTS with Fran Drescher and Chris Kattan getting massacred gets bonus points.

So, here's the story.

Santa Claus is actually the Anti-Christ whose story is told in The Book of Claus.  He is the result of a virgin birth produced by Satan and the only reason he's been giving gifts for the past thousand years instead of an annual day of slaying is because an angel beat him in a curling match.  This is told in Rankin-Bass-esque animation. 

Did I mention that this was filmed in Canada?

Eh, hoser!

So, anyway, in 2005, that deal ended so Santa is free to rampage across the Earth.  He apparently likes strippers unless they reject his advances, then it's roasted silicone on a stick.  His reindeer are man-eaters and, in general, he acts more like Krampus than the avuncular, Coke-swilling, carpet soiling, cookie munching, gift giver we all expect.

Now, you would THINK that this would be just plain AWFUL considering  Hulk Hogan's Hollywood career, but it's really not that bad.

Fuck you, Hulk Hogan.

For one, Goldberg doesn't talk that much.  That probably saves him.  For two, the whole movie is pretty much a giant fuck you to all of those assholes that are all "I'm a Christian, I hate all that PC "Happy Holidays" crap!"

I'ma step on my soapbox here for a second:  There are other religious and secular celebrations that occur in December.  Jewish folk don't force the rest of the world to say Happy Hannukah.  Africans don't force others to say Happy Kwanzaa. Happy Holidays spreads cheer to everyone.  Stop being selfish.  December belongs to everyone and, frankly, most of us just look forward to the paid days off.  If I give you a heartfelt "Happy Holidays", hushyerface and accept it. 

*Ahem*

Sorry about that.  Let's continue.

So, yeah.  This is, much like ThanksKilling (and pretty much any other holiday movie out there) a reason to bust out the Christmas puns and that's not necessarily bad.  This is surprisingly well-written and the acting isn't bad plus you get to hear Santa say "I'm Santa Claus, not fucking Dracula" so I say give it a watch. 

Plus there's bad accents and Fran Drescher being set on fire and drowned in egg nog.

It's like they knew exactly what to get me for Christmas.