Many Reasons For the Season

So I queued up Red Christmas via Netflix because hey! I like a good seasonal horror flick. With Christmas looming, why not devote that Monday to a new yuletide slasher?

Then I slogged through the mean-spirited coal that was Red Christmas and thought to myself, you know Emily, this year has been ugly enough without ending it on such a negative, punishing, anti-choice, mixed garbage statement of a movie. Let's find a happier note to play, something seasonal but positive.

So here are a few random things to love about horror movies during the holidays. And if nothing here works, just screw it all and queue up The Muppet Family Christmas for the 9,00th time. No judgement here. 

The Crypt Keeper Singing Holiday Jingles

Easily the best item ever to be purchased in the '90s by a teenage Emily at the Spencer's Gifts, this album (originally on cassette tape, natch) includes a dozen holiday tunes with the lyrics rewritten to be more fitting of the singer, John Kassir's pun-wielding, tale-spinning Crypt Keeper. Can't get your Walkman working? Revel in the kindness of strangers with YouTube accounts.

The Very Fact That There Exists Not One But Two Killer Snowman Movies

And yet, the unrelated but weirdly similar Michael Keaton family film of the same name is somehow far creepier

The Choice to View Christmas Evil As a Magical Tale of a Lonely Santa-Loving Man Ascending to Angel Status

My (and John Waters) favorite holiday genre film can be viewed as a lot of things: a an early entry into the slasher Santa trend, tragic tale of mental illness taken to extremes, the chance to spot a way-pre-Home Improvement Patricia Richardson in a tiny role. For my money, it's something even more special (that's also all of those things). The key to keeping Christmas Evil on the right side of your heart is to make the conscious decision that SPOILER ALERT! Harry Stadling's van doesn't crash and burn after his killing spree is over, but rather, transcends into the heavens, transforming into a magical sleigh and changing our sad sack factory worker into the real deal Santa. 

Margot Kidder In Black Christmas, Goddess

Easily on the top five list of Film Characters I Want To Lost a Drinking Game To. She. Is. Divine.

Vincent Cassel's Insanity In Sheitan

The movie itself? Somewhat insufferable. The MAN himself? 

A god. Or, well, technically agent of the devil. 

The Most Feel-Good Pop Montage In the Least Feel-Good Slasher

I've said it again and I'll say it an estimated 781 more times before I die: Silent Night Deadly Night is memorable for a bevy of reasons, but none more so than the weirdly placed, tonally mismatched "The Warm Side of the Door" sequence, wherein a sweet country tune cheerfully plays as our soon-to-be-mass-murderer learns about friendship, work ethic, and the joy of having alcoholic bosses.

Eric Freeman's Case For The Academy Awards Adding a Category for Best Performance By a Pair of Eyebrows

I mean...

Clint Howard's Phallic Coven Mask

Everybody forgets Silent Night Deadly Night Part 4 because it doesn't have The Warm Side of the Door or eyebrows, but you what it does have? Murderous roller blades. Also, this:

Ray Wise & Lin Shaye In Dead End

A good but flawed little Christmas Eve ghost story, Dead End deserves to be seen more, mostly because, you know, Ray Wise and Lin Shaye. 

Disco Cameo Greatness

Don't Open Til Christmas is filled with a lot of wonderful things, among them, a smily plastic mask, Halloween costume holiday parties, charmingly innocent peep show conversations, a sleazy male flutist, and insanely slow motion overwrought flashbacks. But you know what REALLY makes it exciting? That it has Caroline Munro randomly performing a disco number. Because if that's not the real reason for the season, what is?

Killer Babies AND Lascivious Dwarfs? It's like a chocolate covered candy cane!

Let us hop into our time-traveling Volkswagen (watch your head, tallies) and drive into the recent past. Around a year and half ago, I reviewed a film called The Sinful Dwarf, a gleefully twisted little tale about often nude newlyweds, forced prostitution, sodomy via cane, and the titular and VERY sinful dwarf.

Why now do I mention this slice of ‘70s sleaze? Well today’s Vertically Challenged Villain-filled feature, The Devil Within Her, ALSO features a sinful dwarf, and you know what folks? it saddens me how rarely I get to say that.


But what's even more exciting than a sinful dwarf attempting to seduce Joan Collins as she's clad like a belly dancer? Why, a DOUBLE DOSE review of course! My good pal and incredibly esteemed blogging colleague, The Vicar of VHS, also caught a little devil within him fever today and if you head over to Mad Mad Mad Mad Movies, you can read his most glorious thoughts.

Quick Plot: Joan Collins (whom you all remember so fondly from Empire of the Ants) plays Lucy, a newlywed new mom with an exotic dancing past. As the film opens, Lucy is having a difficult time giving birth to her son, so much so that the process prompts doctor Donald Pleasance to declare “This child doesn’t want to be born!”

Cue the title (sometimes indeed, I Don’t Want to Be Born!).

With ten fingers, ten toes, and a surprisingly sharp set of teeth, Baby Nicky comes home with Lucy and her daft Italian husband Gino. Immediately after, the family (and stuffy British nanny) notice something is amiss. Sure, all babies cry, but not all bite and toss furniture around the nursery.

Around this time, we as loyal horror viewers must try to decipher the culprit to Nicky’s oddness. Taking the time and place in account (1970s, Rosemary Baby/Exorcist ripoffland) we can deduce it probably involves demonic possession. Maybe a polluted water supply or dubious prenatal vitamin for a more earthly explanation?

Nope. Silly ideas, those. Can’t you tell that Nicky was corrupted because mom once spurned the romantic advances of an angry cabaret dwarf named Hercules?

Didn’t see that coming, did you?

Yep. Hercules has somehow wormed his sexy spirit into a cute baby (usually dressed up like a girl, for who knows why). We know this because of two reasons:

1-An extended, hilarious flashback wherein Lucy recounts Hercules’ failed seduction

2-The fact that any time Nicky acts evil, the film is cross-cut with closeups of the middle-aged Hercules dressed in a bonnet.

A dwarf in a bonnet is a beautiful beautiful thing.

Are you now preparing to give up your firstborn dwarf for this movie?

Like Unborn Sin*, The Devil WIthin Her is a terrible, horrible, no good very bad movie. Like Unborn Sins, it’s also funnier than anything Kevin James has ever eaten. Part of that comes from director Peter Sasdy’s stone-cold serious approach. Even when dwarfs are dancing with handkerchiefs and Carline Munro--clad in enough accessories to make an ‘80s era Madonna call it tacky--is talking, The Devil Within Her remains a ‘supernatural drama,’ trying with all its Herculean might to tap into the soul of Rosemary’s Baby.

But Joan Collins is no Mia Farrow, explicit sex scene be damned. Hubby Gino is a lovable goof, and Eileen Atkins out-Italian-accents Sophia Coppola with her heroic nun. Somewhere in the mix, a skinny Donald Pleasance tries to keep a straight face when philosophizing over evil vs. medicine. And a dwarf dances. 

I can’t think of any other way to really make you want to watch this movie.

High Points

Aside from the hilarious babysitter death, wherein a cheerful woman is pushed headfirst into a rocky lake by a wee little baby hand? Um. The fact that Joan Collins’ son is possessed by the soul of a living dwarf named Hercules pretty much does it for me

Low Points

Well you know...there’s no real explanation for how the angry dwarf managed to possess Joan Collins’ son. But he did, and that’s just fine

Lessons Learned

Italians make the best husbands

The great thing about not breastfeeding is that it allows you to drink hard liquor just three days after bringing your baby home

The biggest limitation of the medical profession is that you can’t write a prescription to fight evil

When you suspect your child of being possessed by the soul of an angry dwarf (nope, I really can’t stop saying that), be careful where you walk. You never know where a perfectly tied noose is hiding for for the right opportunity to hang you

Rent/Bury/Buy

If you live in the United States and still haven’t gathered your monthly savings for Netflix, let this be your inspiration. The Devil Within Her is streaming on Instant Watch, and really, your life will be better when you watch it. Sure it boasts the most ridiculous reason for possession ever (you got NOTHING Doll Graveyard) and the easiest exorcism ever. Seriously. The big finale is a frail nun reading Latin over a giggle infant.

It’s so much more amazing than words can ever possibly explain.

*NOTE: Unborn Sins is the film that will come to define our times or at least, February's Month of the Vertically Challenged Villains. It is one of the greatest things I have ever seen put to screen, but time keeps preventing me from giving it the proper photo treatment. You will know what this means when the day comes this month and your mind is blown.

Slaughterhouse Santa

Words don’t express how sad I am that I’ve gone 27 December 25ths without seeing Don’t Open ‘Til Christmas, but that’s what Mill Creek 50 packs were made for. And along with the soon-to-be-purchased boxed set of Silent Night, Deadly Night 3-5, I now have a new film to add to my annual yuletide viewing. Good thing the Muppet’s 2008 holiday special was rather lame. Not lame enough for Santa to be killed by a pocket-knife wielding psycho, but just under the bar set by Michael Kane, a Fraggle crossover, and Scooter in a go-go cage for Don’t Open ‘Til Christmas to claim its place under my tree.

Quick Plot: There’s a murderer on the loose in London and his targets laugh like a bowl full of jelly, sometimes while chit chatting with sex workers or humorously riding bicycles. An unnecessary and rather inconsistent prologue follows a young necking couple parked in public in the middle of the night (no shot of the street sign reading Lovers’ Lane) as they meet their end by a guy seeming to hold a knife and camera. It’s actually an impressive feat of balance, although the fact that throughout the film, the killer only stalks Santa Clauses and this opening murder makes absolutely no sense in context is something we’ll brush aside in the name of prologue.

Meanwhile, the coolest people I’ve ever seen on film are having a total Halloween-esque costume party to welcome the Christmas season, but sadly, festivities are cut short when the host is stabbed in the back of the head in front of all to see. A few more polyester white beard clad impostors are knocked off in a grab bag of styles, including gunshot, shoe knife slices, castration while urinating, and, in a stroke of true Kris Kringly genius, face roasting on an open fire (previously used to warm chestnuts, of course).

Now, I realize there was no widespread Internet in the 1980s as Al Gore had not yet sought a patent, but I’ve seen my share of spinning newspaper reels to know the general public should have been fairly aware that a serial killer was hungry for a very particular type of victim. So. Why, oh why, would one continue to travel the streets in a red velour jumpsuit? Is the call of St. Nick stronger than that of the Pony Express? It’s an unanswered question in a film that doesn’t really demand anything, so I’ll let this go because, you know what? I loved this movie, and an informed public would imply less dead Santas.

Our main heroine is the rich daughter of the first slain St. Nick, although she gets some stiff competition from Experience Girl (or so the IMDB listing credits her; I'd love to harp on the insanity of this naming, but then I'd forget that Kelly Baker was also in Slaughter High , so we'll move on) who works in what I guess is an old time nudie booth, here portrayed as a store window with prison-style phones for chatting and the option of boobs. There’s also Cliff, (Gerry Sundquist), a flute playing fashion photographer and (according the the trailer) Number One Suspect, and the skeevy Inspector Harris, played by director Edmund Purdom (clearly a man of many talents). We don’t have any reason to like any of them, but by the time the killer reveals his tormented self, the audience is having more fun than a spangly dressed elf gulping eggnog on a strobe-lit disco floor.  

High Points

Am I getting soft, or was the first shot of the plastic mask somewhat unnerving?

The final flashback, wherein we discover the motive for our killer’s hatred of all things tinseled, is absolutely incredible. By that, I mean it makes the death of Billy’s parents in the original Silent Night, Deadly Night look like Citizen Kane...which is sooooooo much less exciting than the intense use of slow motion and echoed sound cues utilized by Purdom here

You have to love a film released in 1984 that still managed to sneak in a complete disco number, performed, no less, by genre fave (and also Slaughter High graduate) Caroline Munro

Low Points

It’s hard to really spot them since this is the kind of movie where all the “bad” aspects (such as the humorously overdramatic score) make it so much fun to watch. I suppose the biggest annoyance is the fact that for the first hour, the only murdered victims are total strangers and thus, we’re less invested in their deaths than we are shopping for a Secret Santa in the office whose name we’re lucky to remember

A somewhat suspenseful and drawn-out cat-and-mouse chase with a gang-fearing Santa Claus in a toy factory has a rather humbug payoff

Lessons Learned

Models should never be photographed too much for fear of being overexposed. This may have been a cute dumb blond pun, but it doesn't really work when the actress has a lower IQ and sense of wordplay than the dumb blond she's portraying

Men with perms do not instill fear upon a 21st century audience

When expressing that you’re “bloody furious,” it's far more effective when you show the slightest trace of emotion in your voice

Murderous Christmas-hating psychotics have mastered the art of smizing (trademarked by Tyra Banks for “smiling with your eyes”)

Time flies really fast when you’re being chased by a serial killer. It can go from night to sunny daylight in the snap of your finger!


Most women are surprisingly not excited by the idea of sapphic photo shoots in Santa suits (particularly when they're mourning the murder of a family member while he happened to be dressed as such)

Repeated Confirmation of a Previous Theory

Staircases are the most lethal type of architecture one can encounter in everyday life...at least in the movies. I’ve fallen up and down many a stairway in my life, so either I’m doing something right or film characters are incredibly brittle.

Winning Line

“They’ll think we’re a couple of gays!” worries the male lead when his lady friend, dressed festively with no underthings, tries to make out in front of teenagers in a dark alleyway. Yes, that’s far more horrifying than the known madmen loose on the streets whom you’ve already witnessed kill a man.

Rent/Bury/Buy

I would never advise someone to spend more than, I don’t know, hot dog money on this film but I enjoyed the Christmas bells out of it. It’s bad in an epic way that’s incredibly watchable, with impressive and creative gore spilled throughout. I’m lucky enough to have it in my Mill Creek Drive-In Classics movie pack, which means you can probably find a copy for peanuts. Is it worth it? You’ll know how you feel about his film based on the tagline:

...t'was the night before Christmas, and all through the house, not a creature was stirring...they were all dead!

True merriment at its best.

Back To School, Slasher Style

Amid the glut of slick remakes and grisly torture porn that has thus far defined 21st century horror films, many fans like to harp back to the good old days of Reagan politics and drive-in cinema, sometimes falsely remembering every midnight screening as the second coming of Citizen Kane. It’s easy to forget that for all its giddy spirit and musical montage-fueled plot development, the 1980s contained a fair heap of cinematic slush, quite often slasher fueled.

And so we come to Slaughter High, Final Girl Stacie Ponder’s Film Club pick for the month of Shocktober. Directed by the possibly drunken trifecta of George Dugdale, Mark Ezra (both of Living Doll), and Peter Litten (director of To Die For, not, thanks to the helpful DVD extras, to be confused with the Nicole Kidman “starrer”) this is to the 80s what something like 2008’s The Hitcher remake is to our current time. Not good. Not needed. Almost bad enough for a good time with alcohol but a tad too awful to deserve your time.

Quick Plot: The world's oldest high schoolers since Grease decide to play a nasty prank on Marty, the bespectacled science nerd with an April Fool’s birthday. Campus hot girl Carol (genre babe Caroline Munro) pretends to seduce him in the locker room shower, only to abandon the birthday boy in his birthday suit while her obnoxious friends dip him a toilet and hurt Wendy’s commercial slogans his way. The totally ungnarly gym teacher issues athletic detention, inspiring one good humored bully to play yet another prank on the unpunished Marty by spiking a joint with poison and rigging a chemistry experiment so it explodes on the science whiz (because innocent whoopee cushions were soooo 1985). Add a jar of precariously placed nitric acid and it’s safe to say young Marty is having the worst birthday since Samantha Baker turned 16.

Ten years later (we assume), our gang of no goodniks return to their alma mater for a private high school reunion, this time as the world’s oldest looking twentysomethings. First, we get a far too long and incredibly dull scene establishing Carol as an up-and-coming actress unwilling to show her goods in a crappy little horror film (for those interested, Ms. Munro does not show her goods in this crappy little horror film either, although several others do so unimpressively). Other characters in this too-large group include a poor man’s Michael Imperioli complete with Joisey voice who seems to be something of a lead, a brassy blond with a randomly South Carolinean accent, and a few more soon-to-be victims who have just about nothing to offer the audience aside from their deaths.

Nobody seems to think it odd that only the cool kids have been invited to this reunion, nor does it raise an eyebrow that it’s being held in the rat-infested high school now abandoned (yet oddly enough, equipped with a working bathtub and fresh body wash). The school caretaker--why he still has to take care of a closed public school is unclear--pops by for a jump scare before being crucified on a graffitied locker as the old friends catch up the best way they know how: soulful bonding over recreational drugs. One of the more annoying male members gulps down a beer and quickly experiences an Alien-ish stomach eruption, minus the charismatic little creature (a shame, since it would have been more interesting than anyone else in this film). Cue frantic running around the dark empty hallways, splitting up for no apparent reason, random boob shots of women who may, if lucky, receive ribbons for participation in wet t-shirt contests, and poorly timed revelations about unseen children’s paternity. 

Yup, Marty’s back and he’s mildly pissed because, you know, these former big kids on campus ruined his social cred and mangled his face. The 99 pound weakling apparently spent the last ten years mastering the art of playing dead, then getting up really quickly and quietly so that several characters can glance at where his body should’ve been and gasp. Ugh.

Slaughter High is not a good movie, nor is it lovably bad like The Pit or slightly innovative and goofy around the likes of Hellgate. With three men credited for directing, it’s easy to see the many places the film went wrong. It’s never clear if we’re supposed to be screaming or laughing at some of the kills, most of which are gory but not particularly well executed. A bombastic score does nothing to heighten drama and the lighting and staging choices are so fuzzily dark that it’s often hard to understand what actually is going on. All this is bad enough, but what ultimately slaughters Slaughter High is its student population.

Normally, character isn’t something we expect to be focused on in a cheap slasher. Aside from the awesomeness of being able to say Kevin Bacon and neck spear in the same sentence, it’s a challenge to name any actor who met his fate at Camp Crystal Lake. The problem with Slaughter High, much like the recent F13 “reboot,” is that it overloads itself with an unruly number of characters while making us care about absolutely none of them. Munro’s Carol has no redeeming factor to make a final girl worth rooting for, while her posse of friends range from white bread bland to ungodly off-putting. Worst of all, Marty himself offers us nothing as either a victim or killer. Sure, I pity any picked-on geek on instinct, but give me one more reason to actually like him. In his one scene of dialogue, Marty comes across as whiny and dumb. My sympathies lied with no one.

At a certain point, however, Slaughter High dragged me into it enough that I was able to keep two eyes onscreen for the last twenty minutes. By then, it seems to be noon the next day (what the last couple of victims were doing for 6 hours is unexplained), which is apparently just enough time to resurrect a few corpses for a fantasy zombie sequence and toss in an unexplained twist rife with sequel and Halloween costume potential. If only anyone could care enough about this movie to get the naughty nurse in drag look.

High Points

I can’t complain about the look of the killer. The jester hat with a wrinkled old man rubber mask had a spark of creepiness about it

You have to love the totally 80s cheesiness of the poster art, even if it does bear a slight resemblance to what I imagine the Killer Condom looked like in his graduation photo

Low Points

You’d think that by featuring older actors with new life problems and what-if wonderings about their high school years, the cast could conjure up some interesting interpersonal relationships. You’d be wrong

Lessons Learned

A caretaker takes care of places

Avoid wearing jingly bell accessories if your main activity of the evening is scheduled to be stalking

When in the 80s, do coke

Gym sneakers retain their exact scent for ten years

If you have the chance to beat a psychotic murderer to near death with a baseball bat, it’s best to not drop the weapon at the mildly bruised killer’s feet and slowly run away

Trust me: the prom queen does not want to have sex with you in the girl’s locker room

Rent/Bury/Buy

Hardcore 80s slasher fans may get a kick out of this little remnant of a time passed, but most others should avoid the temptation of the somewhat kickass poster art. The sole DVD extra is a Pop-Up Video-ish trivia track that occasionally plays under the action to provide viewers with such life changing knowledge as “the hockey mask is a reference to the 1980 slasher film, Friday the 13th.” Random fun facts do offer something new; I only learned here that Nebraska was the last state to ban the electric chair, although what that has to do with Slaughter High isn’t spelled out for us in multiple choice quiz question. Perhaps the best tidbit comes in a True/False question: Actor Simon Scuddamore, who played Marty, died from an intentional overdose shortly after this film’s shooting. When that’s the most interesting thing about your movie, you have a problem.

Don’t forget to head over to Final Girl’s site for a roundup of other bloggers bravely travailing the muck that is Slaughter High. You never know: someone might have given it a passing grade. That someone would have bad taste.

Says the person about to fall asleep with a Sunday night showing of Showgirls.