The Mammoth Book of Slasher Movies (Mammoth Books)

by Peter Normanton

  MONTHS AFTER THE carnage of House of 1000 Corpses, Texas Sheriff John Quincey Wydell (William Forsythe) and a band of State Troopers besiege the psychopathic Firefly family. Mother Firefly (Leslie Easterbrook) is captured, while Otis (Bill Moseley) and Baby (Sheri Moon) manage to escape and soon after kill a nurse and then drive away in her car. They head to a rundown motel in the desert where they sadistically torture and murder two members of a band. Baby’s father, Captain Spaulding (Sid Haig), turns up at the motel and then scenes of degradation follow, with rape and murder followed by more murder as the family leave their calling card smeared in blood on the motel room’s wall “The Devil’s Rejects”.

  Wydell has learned that Mother Firefly murdered his brother. In his dreams, Wydell’s brother demands he seek revenge, and when he awakens the now psychotic sheriff butchers Mother Firefly. He then tracks down the remaining Fireflies, locating them to a brothel owned by Captain Spaulding’s brother, Charlie (Ken Foree). Assisted by a couple of mean bounty hunters known as the “Unholy Two”, the sheriff captures the surviving family members and tortures them, nailing Otis’s hands to a chair and stapling crime scene photographs to his and Baby’s stomach. He turns to Captain Spaulding and beats him before taking a cattle prod to both him and Otis. He then leaves the house ablaze and takes an axe to Charlie. Tiny, who had gone missing in the siege at the beginning of the film, turns up to break Wydell’s neck and save his low-life family. He is left behind as Otis, Baby and Spaulding leave in Charlie’s car, only for them to be gunned down as they drive into a police barricade.

  Rob Zombie’s sequel to the excess of his House of 1000 Corpses (2003), returned to the year of 1978 as his Manson family-styled sadists continued to revel in their life of wilful depravity. On this outing, Rob took the time to build on the characters that he had introduced two years before and was to succeed in fleshing the Firefly family with a set of personalities as well as creating a degree of motive, albeit despicably twisted. He was quick to defend the sickening scenes in his film, insisting his intent was never to glorify violence nor was there a desire to see the audience cheer the bad guys. However, in the movie’s closing scenes the villains of the piece are portrayed as anti-heroes as they are martyred in a blaze of glory to the sound of Lynyrd Skynyrd’s iconic “Free Bird”. If there was a glow amidst the audience, maybe they should have remembered that these were the same degenerates who had savoured every single moment of humiliation they inflicted in the motel rooms, culminating in murder and rape during a sequence of events very reminiscent of the Manson inspired Last House on the Left (1972). In a similar way to Wes Craven’s problematic film, Rob showed how even the most law abiding could be dragged down to the abominable levels of the Firefly family. When The Devil’s Rejects was submitted to the MPAA, the censors were far from happy with the scenes in the motel, forcing two minutes of unpleasantness to be removed prior to its theatrical release. This was later restored for the DVD.

  ALTHOUGH LAU SHU-BILL (Chan Kwok-Bong) appears to be an ordinary fellow, he is an insatiable sex addict. His wife does her best to arouse his desires but her efforts appear hollow and uninspired. Frustrated he turns to the shady streets of Hong Kong. When he takes a girl back to a hotel room, Lau turns to violence and strangles her in the shower. Murder follows upon grisly murder as Lau justifies his homicidal activities as a favour to each of these girls, providing them the chance to reincarnate from the misery of their worthless existence. On several occasions, he is nearly apprehended, but the incompetence of the police and his wife and sister’s unawareness of his sadistic nature allow him to continue in his perverse deliverance. When he falls in love with one of his potential victims, he makes his last mistake and finds himself hauled away to a prison cell, from where his story is told in a series of flashbacks.

  Otto Chan’s film Diary of a Serial Killer was based on Li Wenxian’s reign of terror in Guangzhao’s Wong Po village between 1991 and 1996. Over this five-year period he raped and murdered thirteen women, most of whom were prostitutes. He later told the arresting officers he wanted revenge for a prostitute who had swindled him. Chan allows his unsavoury tale to unfold by way of the flashback narrative used to similar effect by Danny Lee in Dr Lamb (1992) and Herman Yau in The Untold Story (1993). It was little more than an exploitative piece of cinema, which borrowed liberally from Dr Lamb in its portrayal of Lau’s rape and mutilation; it would be these gratuitous scenes that would eventually afford this film a Category III rating. The Hong Kong comic book-styled excess had dead bodies spurting reservoirs of blood even though they had lain dead for several days and then sickened its audience with the severing of one of his deceased victim’s vaginas. The sleazy direction would demand the camera’s lens linger over every girl in the film, as each of them stripped naked before the sexual violence and torture escalated to bloody murder. Cheung Man Po’s photography, however, captured the essence of Chan’s movie in being at times menacing and then in his use of lighting created a suitably unnerving atmosphere, yet during the film’s one moment of love-making a gentle eroticism was clearly observed. Having shocked for almost the entirety of its duration, the image of the doll shown during Diary of a Serial Killer’s closing moments sought once more to disturb, returning unsettling memories of William Lustig’s Maniac (1980).

  IN THE SQUALID world of the late seventies–early eighties sleazy misogyny, Vietnam vet Kirk Smith Beefy (Nicholas Worth) takes the excess to the next level as an impotent maniac, consumed by a psychotic hatred of women. When he’s not pumping iron he’s photographing scantily clad young ladies and selling the shots to a slime ball publisher, who fits perfectly with Don’t Answer the Phone’s seedy premise. Kirk is a deeply troubled man, still tormented by the years of abuse he endured at the hands of his bullying father. Alone in his apartment he continues to engage in a vitriolic dialogue with his long-deceased persecutor. These brief episodes are intended to provide an insight to this hulking man’s murderous spree before he sets out to kill those women of Los Angeles he believes need a lesson in morality. His first victim is a young nurse whom he strangles and rapes and as his depraved vendetta spreads, he begins to rant over the phone in a mock Mexican accent to a talk show psychiatrist, Dr Gale (Flo Garrish). These phone calls come to a climax when Kirk strangles a prostitute while he forces her to talk live on air with Dr Gale. The broadcast turns to one of uncontrollable screaming across the radio waves of the entire city as Kirk tightens his deathly grip around her throat. At first the police refuse to believe the psychiatrist’s claims; they are more inclined to take their enquiries to one of the city’s rundown brothels, where they delight in intimidating its deviant clientele. Kirk slips up when he leaves some of his candid snapshots on the scene of one of his many grisly crimes. Detective Worth finally takes his man down in a slow-motion sequence leaving Kirk for dead in a blood-tinged pool, and who will ever forget the film’s closing line “Adios, creep!”?

  Don’t Answer the Phone started life as The Hollywood Strangler, adopting a similarly catchy title to the previously successful horrors Don’t Look in the Basement (1973), Don’t Ride on Late Night Trains (1975) and Don’t Go in the House (1980). This was to be former photographer Robert Hammer’s only appearance in the director’s chair, as he placed his own particular stamp on the depraved world of exploitative cinema. While this was an early and highly competent entry in the use of hand-held camera filming, there was no effort made to gloss over what was a trashy piece of cinematic misogyny, slavering in its relentless portrayal of sex and violence. Its market was the grindhouse strips of hardcore sleaze and the ever-growing home video market. As with that year’s Maniac and He Knows You’re Alone, Hammer departed from the emerging slasher trope, leaving his audience in no doubt as to the identity of his rapist killer, who was played with a chilling menace by Nicholas Worth. Worth’s lengthy career also saw regular appearances in Star Trek Deep Space Nine and Star Trek Voyager, along with providing his voice for The Reaper in The Hills Have Eyes II (1985). What followed
was an uncompromising violent display targeted at his female cast, who were nearly all damaged by drug addiction, physical abuse or the threat of suicide. Rather than revelling in an excess of gore, his film derived its cruel pleasure in lingering over its semi-naked female victims struggling and squirming as the murderer strangled the very life out of them.

  The rights to Michael Curtis’s book Nightline were purchased in the making of this film for only $2,500. Curtis’s book was a fictionalized account of the Hillside Strangler murders committed by the psychotic Kenneth Bianchi and his cousin Angelo Buono between 1977 and 1978. Shortly afterwards another murderous pair, Lawrence Bittaker with Roy Norris, who had photographed over 500 pictures of girls taken along the Pacific Coast Highway, went on a similar murderous spree. The details of their crimes were infinitely worse than anything detailed in Hammer’s film. While Hammer has many pleasant memories in the making of his feature, the trauma of trying to find a distribution deal resulted in a swift change of career; he moved into finance, but admits he could very easily be persuaded to return to make another film. Fans of this film still prefer the original US VHS edition as the latest issue to DVD has suffered at the hands of a set of butchering censors. The original version released to cinemas in the UK was only reduced by around a minute when submitted to the BBFC, with edits demanded to three specific episodes. These include the tying-up of a woman prior to her murder, and her nightdress being ripped open. The shots of her breasts being burned with candle wax were not included in the original submission. The cuts to this release continued with the strangulation of the model, which was heavily edited, along with the removal of the shot of the killer placing a coin in her stocking. Finally, the murder of another prostitute was also missing a similar shot of a coin. This was later reinstated in 2005, but the previously mentioned cuts had been lost and only slightly marred the film’s final restoration.

  Dn’t Go in the House was dismissed when it first came to the cinemas and was yet another slasher of the period to lay forgotten until its short-lived release to video. Director Joseph Ellison had broken the rules with his entry to these years of mayhem, frustrating his audience with a conspicuous lack of blood and guts. To add to its problems this was also an independent production, reliant on a similarly small independent distribution company by the name of FVI. Unfortunately, they didn’t do a particularly good job in their promotion of this film, and as a result many potential cinema-goers were oblivious of its existence.

  Donald Kohler (Dan Grimaldi) stands transfixed at the incinerator plant where he works, morbidly fascinated by the sight of a colleague catching fire. As a child, his arm was seriously burned by his domineering mother as punishment for a minor misdemeanour. Years later, now a grown man, he arrives home from work to discover his mother lying dead in her chair. The voices in his head insist it’s party time! And so, after years of being downtrodden, Donny cuts loose, turning up that crazy disco sound and bouncing on the furniture. Donny, however, is beginning to lose his grip on reality as the whispers and echoes around his head assume control of his faculties. Picking up a young lady, he takes her home to meet his mother. She is the first of many, each of them blondes and brunettes, much like his tyrannical mother. Once inside the house he strips them, liberally douses their trussed bodies in petrol and then in quite graphic shots incinerates them with a flame-thrower while locked away in a homemade steel-plated room. Donny’s calm demeanour, coupled with the silence as he looks on, emphasizes the true horror of what has just happened. In a deranged display echoing Psycho (1960) and Deranged (1974), he dresses their charred bodies in his mother’s clothes and settles them in her bedroom, where in the shadows he finds time for quiet conversation. Suspicions are aroused when he dons a disco suit and soon after, taking to the dance floor, sets light to his date’s hair.

  Ellison’s film was by no means a classic of the genre, but it was a compelling account of the final stages of a complete psychological breakdown. The allusions to mental illness would cause much heated debate when the film went to video release, but the gore-mongers of 1980 felt cheated – too much in the way of disco and an absence of bloody carnage.

  AWOMAN IS SEEN chasing through the woods; she plunges into a stream and then disappears. Soon after, she is recorded as yet another missing person. A shift in scene introduces four young campers, Craig, Peter, Ingrid and Joanie, trekking through this vast wilderness in search of a weekend of fun-filled adventure. As they hike through the woods, someone armed with a sharp spike has set about the slaughter of the other visitors to the area. Very soon, they will face the same nightmare as they encounter a dense part of the forest that becomes appreciably darker with each passing step. With the sense of isolation becoming more obvious, something appears in the shadows brandishing a machete and carves up young Craig. The rest of the group flee into the forest with the maniac murderer in close pursuit.

  James Bryan’s film has been placed among the worst films in the genre and yet it has still managed to acquire something of a cult reputation. The story was highly derivative of the previous year’s Just Before Dawn but on this occasion failed to offer the obligatory twist to the closing proceedings. Further to this, the acting left much to be desired along with a predictable plot beset by just too many gaping holes. The killer was given little in the way of background and the dubious make-up job certainly didn’t do him any favours. However, for all of its failings Don’t Go in the Woods Alone contained a series of expertly crafted shocks in addition to a collection of grisly kill scenes which led to an appallingly gruesome finale. While some of the photography gave away the fact Hank Zinman was still learning his trade, the tracking across this mountainous terrain certainly made up for this failing, being pleasant on the eye yet providing an ever so threatening backdrop. The film was released to video in the early 1980s, and may have passed unnoticed if it hadn’t made it to the UK’s list of video nasties before being banned under the stipulations of the Video Recordings Act. Up until its uncut release in 2007, it was considered a video rarity.

  TWELVE THOUSAND YEARS ago, tribe members Gar (Crackers Phinn) and Tra (Barbara Bain) were banished for ritually cannibalizing their kinsmen’s children in the hope of gaining eternal youth. Before they were set free, the ageing queen of the tribe cursed them to walk the earth for all eternity; the only way that they can retain their youth is to continue to consume human flesh. After a long line of killing sprees lasting nigh on one hundred and twenty centuries, Gar leaves the Los Angeles park that he and Tra have made their home, and in a very short space of time finds an apartment, meets and marries an attractive young lady (Linnea Quigley,) who gives birth to their daughter Bondi (Tamara Taylor). When she becomes a teenager, Bondi runs away from home. No longer able to endure the instability of her family life, she falls into the hands of a gang of rapists, in what are the most disturbing scenes of the film. When she escapes, thanks to her father’s magic amulet, she joins two other runaways who by a strange coincidence live with the sister of the cave dwellers. Bondi now learns she is to be sacrificed and then devoured to allow Gar and Tra preserve their eternal life. When their plan is discovered zombie-like creatures rise from the earth and Gar and Tra acquire laser beam eyes in what will be the build up to the final showdown.

  Lawrence David Foldes had only just turned twenty when he directed this rather ambitious film, so maybe his lack of experience can be forgiven. Don’t Go Near the Park, which has also gone by the names Curse of the Living Dead, Nightstalker and Sanctuary for Evil, was a very amateur-looking production, blighted by unconvincing make-up, inadequate use of lighting and acting on a par with so many of these exploitative ventures. The story-line defied belief in its lack of coherence and culminated in a finale that its audience would never have been able to predict. The title of the film was evocative of two other reasonably successful exploitation features, Don’t Go in the House (1980) and Don’t Look in the Basement (1972); unfortunately, it did not begin to compare. Fans of horror scream queen Linnea Quigley w
ill be delighted to see one of her earlier scantily clad appearances, in a career that continues to this very day. For Foldes this would be his skeleton in the closet as he moved on to new projects and gained experience that took him on to far greater things. While the gore effects were not particularly convincing, their excess, which focused on lacerated stomachs and their entrails being torn from them, gave the film an element of lasting notoriety. These scenes of course meant that when Foldes’ film found its way into the UK in 1983 it was registered as a video nasty in the November of that year, not to be removed from the offending list until July 1985. It would be over twenty years before it would be seen in its entirety, following its release to DVD in 2006 in what had become, if only for a while, a more tolerant Britain.