Let the Wrong One Live: The 5 Worst Survivors In Horror History

As some of you know and others don't care about, I spent the last year or so contributing to Pop Syndicate, a recently renovated website that lost all its past content (and writers). The following article appeared in 2009 and since you can't find it anywhere else in InterWorld, I'm rerunning it here. Apologies for the deja vu.

Don’t you hate it when the wrong ones get away? While the majority of kill-heavy horror films know the proper hunting formula, every now and then, some undeserving soul smiles triumphantly in the final freeze frame, leaving the audience to scratch their heads and sit through seven minutes or so of badly scored credits, waiting in the hope that the director was saving his final kill for those with patience to spare.

What follows is a spoiler-rich countdown of films that leave us wanting more...blood. Specifically, enough to drain the life out of a survivor or two.

5. Day and Land of the Dead

Some critics have observed that Uncle Romero has softened in recent years, but I take it one step back and argue he’s still burning off the sweetness from eating too many chocolate Bonkers in the 80s. Day of the Dead has a fine collection of Savini packaged blood and guts, but the fact that none come out of the bodies of any ‘good’ character takes a certain depth out of the movie. Likewise, Land of the Dead loses a sympathetic John Lequizamo, but once again, our rather dull heroes get to ride off into the twilight in full force. There’s a reason so many people felt empty at the end of Romero’s quadrilogy finale: very little happened to the people we were meant to care about.  I do realize that Diary of the Dead has a richer body count, but, well...I just didn’t care enough about the living or deceased to really include it here.

4. Kingdom of the Spiders

There's no reason for William Shatner's heroic veterinarian to die in this 1977 tarantula flick...no reason, except, say, the fact that he gets bitten by about twenty DDT enhanced arachnids who had previously proved that one nibble was enough to take down a horse. Was there some sort of antidote in Kirk’s far too prominent belt buckle? Did the tightness of his jeans prevent the venom from spreading through his doughy body? Even if his (and quite possibly the rest of the world’s) fate is left tangled up in webs, Shatner’s survival is a cheat.

3. Snakes On a Plane

If you build your marketing campaign around earning an R rating, you have a responsibility to your ticket buying public to provide inventive kills and little mercy. Snakes On a Plane never got that memo, as observed by the surviving characters that include the bland leading man, an obnoxious Beverly Hills brat actually named Mercedes, and worst of all, two bratty little kids who should have been marked for death in the first reel. Even a dud like 1976's Rattlers  had the nerve to knock off a few obnoxious child actors in the pre-credit sequence. Snakes On a Plane, on the other hand, teased us with bad assery and delivered a de-fanged bite.

2. Silent NIght, Deadly Night

As my Catholic school-educated mother has often said, nuns are evil. Mother Superior (Jean Miller), the primary villain in this notorious 1986 Santa Clause slasher, is arguably the least likable character in a film exclusively populated by extremely unlikable characters. You'd think the filmmakers--who so clearly hate everything in this world--would revel in the chance take a few shots at a God-fearing and child-hating Dominican. You'd think wrong. Somehow the woman partially responsible for harnessing little Billy’s psychotic tendencies and mind-boggling confusion over what Santa Clause actually does gets to celebrate another Christmas (probably by slapping the wrists of orphans with a candy cane). The only redeeming factor is that the world’s meanest nun loses her habited head in the gloriously bad sequel.

1. Scream 3

By all accounts, David Arquette’s bumbling Sheriff Dwight Riley should never have survived Wes Craven’s first installment of this meta-slasher. I’ll accept the fact that Dewy was just too gosh darn lovable for test screen audiences to mourn. I’ll even give him a free pass for Part 2 since Randy was sacrificed. But by the third installment, his number was up. Remember the ads that boasted how no one was safe? Apparently they were referring to Jenny McCarthy, the other guy from Felicity, and the token black dude. We loyal fans, who survived Courteney Cox’s bangs and Nev Campbell’s squints, get to end with the lamest double date in horror history. 

So dear bloodthirsty readers, please share your cravings: which last men, women, and children standing would you like to see get a much more exciting alternate ending?

Reader Recommendation: Wrong Turn 2: Dead End

“I watched Wrong Turn 2 with my very squeamish mother and had a blast.”--Barbarella Cult

“The only other choice I considered was "Wrong Turn 2," which I happened to watch for a similar, single reason, that being it had Henry Rollins playing a reality show host who battles inbred mutants in the woods!”--Dave

“I'm writing to convince you that the fact that you have not yet watched Wrong Turn 2 is a damn travesty and one you desperately need to remedy.

Firstly, the basic story is a Survivor-esque tv show gets gatecrashed by inbred, incestuous, sexually rampant MUTANTS.

Secondly, Henry Rollins plays an ex-marine who hosts the show. You need to watch it just to hear Rollins say "Semper Fi" to himself after dispatching one of the nasties.

Thirdly, there's an incestuous mutant sex scene where the she-mutant wears the scalp of one of the contestants.

And lastly, there's a third film.”--Rachel, GoF Radio 

I love you all so much.

Quick Plot: En route to film a Survivor-esque reality show in the backwoods of West Virginia, Kimberly American Idol 2 Caldwell gets split in half by a pair of hungry carnivorous mutants.

Hell yes folks, it’s Wrong Turn 2.

Meanwhile, your typical batch of attractive twentysomethings (who aren’t here to make friends) prepare for a few days in the woods for Survival: Apocalypse, a show that would be insanely awful if not for the hosting of the more amazing than humanly possible Henry Rollins. The token types are present: fame-craving nympho, solid black guy, horndog, militant lesbian, bipolar vegan who resembles a much smaller headed Julia Stiles, and last minute understudy in the guise of a good girl producer. The group is soon paired off and sent out for...well, although the rules are laid out clearly by Rollins, I actually have no clue what they’re actually going to be doing in West Virginia.

And really, do you think it matters? Within “three hours,” the mangled forest mutant from the 2003? film are making themselves known, tossing axes, shooting arrows, and cooking up dinner on an open fire. Of course, they also have to deal with the Rollins’ former marine, a man who knows his way around dynamite, hunting knives, and generally, everything about kickassness.

Much like the first film, Wrong Turn 2 doesn’t tell a new story. But much like Wrong Turn, Wrong Turn 2 knows exactly who its audience is. Director Joe Lynch is clearly a horror fan raised on the best and he delivers a bloody good time from start to finish. There’s no social subtext or satirical bent, no lessons about a fame obsessed America or how the civilized can become monstrous. Environmental message? Go rent Avatar.

Nope. All you'll get here are inbred mutants, gleefully hacking their way through somewhat prepared young people. Really, what more can you want from a straight to DVD horror sequel?

High Points

High five for the not so subtle Battle Royale t-shirt?

I’ll tread lightly through spoiler territory, but by far the best thing about Wrong Turn 2 that isn’t listed below is how it teases us with the typical backwoods formula but completely defies our expectations in when and how it kills its characters. In particular, the first major casualty severs the umbilical cord of what seems like an obvious plot thread. It’s a beautiful (and bloody) thing

Henry. Rollins.

Low Points

Um. There’s an actor in the film named Texas Battle, which is just silly. That’s just about it

Lessons Learned

If vegan and cast on a reality show, assume you’ll soon be challenged to eat larvae. Sort of like how there’s a new contestant on America’s Next Top Model who’s an Orthodox Jew and introduces herself as not working on the Sabbath and immediately says “Oh, but I’m okay with it for modeling!”

It’s perfectly normal for a reality show to replace a celebrity guest with the crew’s mousy producer

When cooked by experts, human meat is apparently quite excellent

Backwoods mutant births take less time than an Emmy acceptance speech by an unknown technical operator

Henry Rollins is my god

Rent/Bury/Buy

This is the definition of a good time for any horror fan. Gory, funny, and self-aware with a huge rewatchability factor for all. The DVD includes TWO commentaries, plus a making-of featurette and a few other goodies. I enjoyed the first Wrong Turn as a better-than-average studio offering. I loved Wrong Turn 2 for being, quite simply, 98 minutes of all that's great in the world.

You Are Now Entering the Gates to the City of Living Dead of Hell

The best thing about recently watching City of the Living Dead is discovering that it’s also known as The Gates of Hell. See, all this time I thought I was realllly behind on my Italian horror viewing and assumed I had not one but two Fulci classics to catch up on. Imagine, then, my pleasure at realizing I was actually killing two birdemics with one stone.

Quick Plot: When I’m talking about Fulci films, this is usually the part where I excuse myself to giggle for a few minutes. 

Deep breath...

Okay. A priest hangs himself in the town of Dunwich, a New England (sure) hamlet with a history of witch persecution. Meanwhile, somewhere else, a psychic named Mary (Fulci regular Catriona MacColl, or, as the opening credits here claim, Katriona Mac Call) dies during a seance just after discovering the titular (depending on your cut) Gates of Hell have now been opened in Dunwich, rendering all the dead into teleporting zombies. 

Meanwhile, a gravely reporter named Peter (Christopher George, he of Graduation Day ) becomes interested in Mary’s death and visits her freshly dug (and not covered) grave. This is quite good for Mary, since she’s actually alive (no reason ever really given for how that got by the doctors) and saved by the even more curious Peter. Despite the whole being buried alive thing, Mary recovers quick enough to insist on heading to Dunwich in order to save the world. Somehow.

That’s kind of City of the Living Dead, just with a lot of creatively rendered and caused gore tossed in. As we can expect from a Fulci film, great things happen, like a girl calmly vomiting up her internal organs and a young man having his head drilled in one end and out the other. There’s also a whole lot of nonsensical dialogue, extreme closeups on actors’ eyes, and a story that never quite communicates its urgency. 

At the same time, City of the Living Dead is far more linear than something like The Beyond . The plot makes some sense, but in typical Fulci fashion, the audience is less concerned about the details of the climax than they are with ensuring said climax is filled with gooey Italian carnage. It is.

High Points

You can’t fault the gore, which looks as icky as you’d expect and hope for in a Fulci film

Low Points

So this is the second movie that involves a character named Emily dying a horrible death. Were Fulci still alive, I’d make it a point of never pissing him off

Lessons Learned

Union rules for grave diggers are quite strict

In some forms of therapy, it’s perfectly okay for the psychologist’s girlfriend to barge into a private session and discuss a canceled date in front of the stressed out patient slowly coming to terms with her incestuous urges

New England is the foggiest place on earth

Rent/Bury/Buy

I streamed City of the Living Dead on Netflix which was probably enough for a casual Italian horror enthusiast such as myself. The film has recently received the fully featured Blu Ray treatment, so those with a serious Fulci fetish will probably be happy with a buy. Like The Beyond, this is certainly rewatchable in a background kind of way, particularly since the story makes such little sense that it won’t necessarily merit your full attention. It’s definitely worth a watch, particularly if you’re a completist. Not great by any means, but passable entertainment at its gooiest.

Location Location Location

As some of you know and others don't care about, I spent the last year or so contributing to Pop Syndicate, a recently renovated website that lost all its past content (and writers). The following article appeared in 2009 and since you can't find it anywhere else in InterWorld, I'm rerunning it here. Apologies for the deja vu.


Some time back, I mentioned a movie that deserves no real further discussion: Moscow Zero, the Val Kilmer-headlined Russian thriller with little thrills and even less Kilmer. What bothered me was not so much that the film was dull (because anything that helps me sleep is welcome in my life) but that it wasted one of the greatest potential settings of any horror. The Moscow Metro system is deeper than hell and probably crawling with more agents of evil than Walmart in December. 

Naturally, this got me thinking of other places that naturally frighten visitors and the films that utilized set location for maximum thrills. Enter at your own risk:

Closed carnivals

Is there anything sadder than a man-made playground abandoned by man?  Squeaky rides and stale popcorn just aren’t the same without screaming kids that beg for seconds and then throw up the remains on wooden roller coaster...especially when the amusement park is littered with ghostly apparitions that really like to waltz. Hence, the classic 1962 Carnival of Souls, a beautifully surreal ghost story inspired by a lonely Salt Lake City locale and filmed to translate its spooky atmosphere onto the big screen. 

Warehouses

Part of my workday is stationed in an overcrowded appliance warehouse. Recently, I took a wrong turn and ended up navigating a labyrinth of boxes that would make the Goblin King grip his codpiece in GPS-less fear. Storage facilities are dangerous places, and not just because they tend to be generously stocked with sharp objects and sloppily stacked with heavy boxes. While Final Destination 3 packed on the precarious nail gun and other fatal industrial accouterments, my heart goes out to Child's Play 2 for its factory finale. Many people never understand why a two-foot doll instills such fear in so many filmgoers, but imagine a petite plastic redhead chasing you through an endless maze of ominous cardboard. It’s scary. And brown.

Hotels

The thing about lodging facilities is, despite all lazily standard attempts to make you think otherwise, they’re not your home. In fact, they’re no one’s home, yet countless scores of travelers have come before to sleep, make love, and flip through basic cable, all under the watch of bland pastel paintings in rooms that look identical to a million others across your respective country. There’s something existential and empty about the very idea of a pay-by-the-night place. Of course, The Shining is the definitive hotel horror for capturing the vast emptiness of a place that has been well lived (and died)-in before a cracking family moves in. I’d also point to the more recent Bug. The terror of this Friedkin thriller/drama/horror/undefined piece of disturbia doesn’t necessarily lie in its setting, but Ashley Judd’s cheap residential motel does help to create an atmosphere that never feels quite like home--thus making her lonely and longing waitress all the more vulnerable to forming a not-so-healthy connection with Michael Shannon’s quiet and slowly unraveling stranger. One thing’s for sure: by the end of Bug, you’ll never have to worry about confusing that room with the Day’s Inn.

Empty asylums

What’s scarier than a home for the criminally insane? How about one abandoned by the criminally insane? House on Haunted Hill makes nice use of its institutional mansion setting, but few films have created such a terrifying location as Brad Anderson’s Session 9. Filmed in the former Danvers State Hospital (aka the State Lunatic Hospital at Danvers, a far scarier title), Session 9 follows a frustrated asbestos removal crew and their ill-fated attempt to clean up am empty  (and most likely haunted) asylum. Like Carnival of Souls, Session 9 absorbs its environment, squeezing every drop of horror and letting it spread into the cast, music, lighting, and overall filmic effect. Plus, it achieves the seemingly impossible task of making David Caruso sympathetic. 

Tundra

I gave up watching Survivor the day Mark Burnett announced the show would never be filmed in the Arctic. To me, watching resourceful people combat frostbite and fight polar bears is far more exciting than seeing bad cases of sunburn aggravating oozing mosquito bites... which is probably why I hold winter horror in such high esteem. For true frozen conditions, John Carpenter’s The Thing pretty much corners the vast, cold market on ice, especially since Kurt Russell & Co. battle the boredom and isolation of Antarctica while  dealing with a shape-shifting gooey creature set on world domination. The more recent 30 Days of Night took great advantage of the Arctic Circle’s weirdly misunderstood sunrise patterns by, naturally, making it a haven for vampires. Sure, it fudged the actual earth science a tad, but 30 Days of Night also answered the question for why America’s largest state has such a small population.  

So my safely nestled readers, which films have you constantly noting the nearest exit? Also, what are some of your everyday hot spots just waiting for a bloody massacre to redden to floors?

Reader Recommendation: Terror Train

“I guess I'll go with Terror Train.  You must, must, must see this slasher.  Jamie Lee Curtis and David Copperfield??  Copperfield should be enough to pull you in.  It's one of [the Naked Eskimo]'s all time favorite slashers.  Plus, it takes place in a train!  Claustrophobia!  It's also an instant play from Netflix.  You wouldn't have to wait for it!”--Recommended by the Bodacious Barbarella Cult

I did not wait for Terror Train. In fact, I’ve decided to do a new sort of Netflixing where I close my eyes, press a bunch of buttons and hit ‘ok’ when I feel inclined. And that my friends is how I decided to finally watch the infamous Canadian pleasure, Terror Train.

Quick Plot: Like every ‘80s slasher, Terror Train begins with a prank gone wrong as premed fraternity brothers haze Kenny, a nerd (identified as such by his thick glasses, naturally) by cock teasing him with Alana, played by original scream queen Jamie Lee Curtis (save your hermaphrodite jokes for the showers boys). Due to some confusingly hung drapery and Kenny’s overreaction to kissing a corpse, the poor geek gets the crazies and we flash forward three years.

To celebrate their last winter break, the now senior fraternity members and their gal pals don Halloween costumes and take a rather awesome old fashioned train ride, complete with uncomfortable cots, tiny bathrooms, a band composed of high fashion hipsters who don't play their own instruments, and...get this, David Copperfield!

The rails are rocking harder than Night Train to Terror  (not true; nothing rocks harder than Night Train to Terror) but before you can say all aboard, a mysterious masked man has swiped a frat boy’s Groucho Marx disguise and begun a slow but steady killing spree of some of the past prank participants. The only person that seems to be actively doing anything about it is the kindly conductor Carne, played by lovable presence Ben Johnson. 

I won’t spoil the twist of Terror Train, a neat little plot point that’s both slightly predictable but really not. People die. The killer is revealed. I giggle. And Jamie Lee Curtis cries. You know the story.

High Points

You can’t not love the setting, an antiquated (unless you travel through Russia) train that instantly offers plenty of claustrophobic and inescapable titular terror

In these kinds of movies, it’s always good to have a hateable antagonist due for a painful demise and Terror Train packs a doozie with Hart Bochner’s Doc. With his smarmy attitude and girl-shriek, Bochner (who later went on to play another smarmy doomed fella in Die Hard and, more importantly, directed one of the best Jon Lovitz vehicles of all time, High School High) is like a slightly taller Tom Cruise, possible homosexuality and all.

(You sir, are no match for Hans Gruber.)

Low Points

Aside from its fantastic location, there’s just nothing that different about Terror Train to make it overly memorable. Sure, it’s better in quality than Slaughter High  or Graduation Day, but just about every character and plot point feels like it was taken out of a slasher recipe book and served on an assembly line-run cafeteria

Lessons Learned

The best magic trick of all involves super fast nail polish removal

Shaking your dead and bleeding friend generally does not bring him back to life. Perhaps that’s something learned in med school, as opposed to undergraduate university

Much like Jamie Lee, David Copperfield tragically missed out on a promising career as a disco dancer

Dear nerds of the world: I don’t know how many movies can support this before you take note, but please believe me when I say the gorgeous popular girl does not want to sleep with you and if she does, she probably isn’t going to tell the whole school about it in order to lure you to her bed

Rent/Bury/Buy

Terror Train is the very epitome of all that’s good and bad about the ‘80s slasher. Each character fits the exact role card required (good girl, slutty girl, slightly bad girl, bad handsome boy, likable chubby dude, wimpy boyfriend, second kill black guy, etc.) and with the exception of a slightly bizarre reveal, nothing really surprises the modern viewer. That being said, any slasher fan will nostalgically grin at seeing JLC cut some dance moves and a masked baddie ax his way through bratty coeds. The film is currently streaming on Instant Watch which is pretty much where it should be seen. Not really worth a whole lot of energy investment, but vital for those slasher completists.

Vengeance, Gambling, and Victoria's Real Secret (psst: it's that she hates boobs)

aka, New GirlsOnFilm Radio Podcast episode HERE! 

Run your earlobes now for...

 giggly talk about the elegant violence of Lady Snowblood...

The overlong but still classy Scorcessian Casino...

and as always, the true horror that is bra shopping

Gentlemen, you really don't know the pain we endure in the name of support. 

So support us with your ears, won't you?