The Mammoth Book of Slasher Movies (Mammoth Books)

by Peter Normanton

  CHARLOTTE BEALE (ROSIE Holotik) leaves her position as a hospital supervisor to join a secluded private mental institution, headed by a Dr Stevens. His approach to therapy is somewhat radical in that he allows the psychologically disturbed to confront their inner demons and hopefully cure themselves. Before she arrives to take up her new role, Dr Stevens is murdered. The strict Dr Geraldine Masters (Annabelle Weenick) attempts to calm the patients with the help of Sam (Bill McGhee), a lobotomized giant whose mind is that of a child, manifested by his fixation for chocolate ice-lollies. When she arrives, her welcome from Dr Masters isn’t the most cordial and she learns she will be sharing her accommodation with the inmates. To make matters worse her skimpy nurse’s outfit also leaves nothing to the imagination. As she sleeps at night, the patients can be heard roaming freely around her bed. Among them are the nymphomaniac Allysson, who also has homicidal tendencies; Harriet, a woman haunted by the death of her child in a horrendous accident; the Sergeant who blames himself for the death of his platoon; Judge Cameron, a man with delusions of power and an unsettling predilection for an assortment of axes; and Danny whose insanity triggers the murders that follow. Each of them begins to test her sanity, pushing her to the brink in the hallways and confined stairways that lead to secreted passageways and other hidden parts of this institution. Nurse Beal comes to realize there is something seriously wrong here, but what will she find on her one visit to the basement?

  Sherald Brownrigg’s low-budget exploitation shocker was originally entitled The Forgotten, and has also gone by the name Death Ward 13, but Don’t Look in the Basement proved a little more apt on its release to the drive-ins. This well-plotted film cleverly escalated the atmosphere, thriving on the air of obsessive madness, using unusually well-lit scenes whose starkness conspired to unsettle the viewer. The film wasn’t exceptionally gory, largely because the slaughterhouse entrails Brownrigg had hoped to use started to rot due to the heat on the set. The stench was to prove a little too much for the cast and crew. Maybe it was the stench, but this piece of exploitation was cited as a video nasty in the August of 1984 as word spread of its release to video some eighteen months before in February 1983. It was removed from the list in December 1985 and released uncut in 2005. Although this version is unavoidably grainy, it couldn’t disguise the gorgeous former Playboy Playmate, Rosie Holotik, who made it to that magazine’s cover in April 1972.

  IN A LONDON backstreet, a parked car reveals a man dressed as Santa Claus (John Ashton) getting rather aroused with a female acquaintance (Maria Eldridge). Before he can consummate his passion, he realizes someone is prying on them and gets out of the vehicle, preparing for a confrontation. It never happens, for as he turns to face the offending peeping tom he immediately falls to the ground, the victim of an unidentified killer’s blade. His female companion is the next to confront the assassin’s sharpened implement. Shortly afterwards with a fancy dress party in full swing, another Santa (Laurence Harrington) is killed by a spear when it is driven through his head. The brooding Chief Inspector Harris (Edmund Purdom) and Sergeant Powell (Mark Jones) are immediately assigned to the investigation, but they are baffled by the lack of evidence.

  The murders continue as an aspiring newspaper reporter, Giles (Alan Lake), begins to take an unhealthy interest in the case. While he follows his own line of enquiry, Gerry (Kevin Lloyd), a porn magazine photographer, focuses his lens on a model named Sharon (Pat Astley) posing in nothing but a Santa robe, thigh high boots and skimpy panties. When the police spot the titillating shoot, the pair is forced to make their escape into the London night. The terrified Sharon stumbles into a darkened alleyway only to be set upon by the killer, who wastes little time in slashing a razor across her exposed breasts. However, she manages to survive, only to be arrested for indecent exposure. Sometime later, in a sleazy strip club another Santa (Wilfred Corlett) engages a stripper (Kelly Baker) hidden away in the privacy of a booth. Before she can settle to her routine, he is butchered before her very eyes. We eventually learn that as a child the killer witnessed his father dressed as Santa canoodling with a party guest, before murdering his mother.

  This sleazy mix of murder and gory splatter epitomized Dick Randall’s low-budget approach to exploitative filmmaking, yet at the outset there were high hopes that it would be a lucrative successor to his chainsaw terror, Pieces (1982). Sadly, Don’t Open Till Christmas turned out to be a problematic endeavour, running to almost two years in production. Lead actor Edmund Purdom and former sex film director Derek Ford, the film’s writer, both resigned from the director’s chair leaving the film’s editor and former sex cinema owner Ray Selfe to bring this troubled feature to completion, but even he was unable to retain any sense of coherent narrative. The quality of the acting once again begged many questions, but the gore factor more than made up for these shortcomings, as the male victims were roasted, gouged, shot, stabbed, speared and, in a grimy toilet scene, castrated. In the repressed Britain of 1985, such a scene was only going to add to the film’s difficult history and before it could be released in any format, it was subject to a substantial amount of editing, as was the scene involving the scantily clad Pat Astley. For all of its failings Randall’s film was an intriguing glimpse of the sordid underbelly that the authorities in the UK tried to keep hidden from public view, but for those that so desired it was there ready to be found.

  THE AGEING DORMITORY, Morgan Meadows Hall, has been condemned and is being made ready for the bulldozers. Joanne Murray (Laura Lapinski) and her friends have the unenviable task of removing the desks, beds and other paraphernalia over the Christmas holiday period. One of the girls, Debbie (Daphne Zuniga), learns her grandmother is ill and has to return home with her parents. However, before they leave the school Debbie’s head is crushed off-screen by a car and her parents are seen to die at the hands of a mysterious killer, all of which takes place in less than thirty seconds. The next day the crazy looking John Hemmit (Woody Roll) is spotted loitering around the school premises. Soon after Bobby Lee Tremble (Dennis Ely) arrives, claiming to be interested in buying the old desks, but his attention seems drawn towards Joanne. As night falls, caretaker (Jake Jones) comes face to face with the prowler and gets a drill to the back of his head, in what is without doubt the goriest scene in the movie. The friends become seriously concerned when both the power and the phone lines are cut off. One by one, they are hunted down in the darkness leading to an intense climax that carries a surprise of its own.

  The name The Dorm that Dripped Blood still evokes memories of Amicus’s memorable portmanteau terrors made between 1964 and 1973, but this was another standard slasher movie, which crammed in virtually every cliché known to this strain of eighties-styled horror movie. Stephen Carpenter and Jeffrey Obrow’s Death Dorm college project was hopelessly underfinanced, culminating in the low-budget production values that have come to typify the genre. However, their efforts were rewarded when it was granted a limited theatrical release, albeit with much editing by the distributor. Carpenter and Obrow’s concerns with the budget and a lacklustre plot meant much of the earlier part of the film was spent exploring the basement with flashlights, after they had immediately grabbed the audience’s attention with a quite brutal series of murders. The slaughter would eventually resume with the head in the pressure cooker that has since been used on both the lurid cover to the video and the 2003 DVD release, and the body count would rise to a lofty ten before the killer’s identity was finally revealed. The shadows and point-of-view killer shots certainly worked to raise the tension, as did Chris Young’s atmospheric score that would see him embark upon an incredibly successful career. Carpenter and Obrow would continue to nurture their writing and directorial skills to produce the more successful The Power (1984) and then The Kindred (1987). The diminutive student backing and limited cinematic release would make The Dorm that Dripped Blood one of the more obscure entries from the period, but its notoriety was guaranteed when it was prosecuted by the DPP to join the list of offensive
video nasties in October 1983 following its release to video in June 1982. It was removed from the list in September 1985 but ten seconds of cuts to the drilling of the caretaker have still never been made officially available in the UK.

  IN THE YEAR 1957 the locals of a quiet suburb in the town of Moorhigh have discovered Dr Rendell’s dark secret – that he and his son, Evan Jr., nicknamed “Dr Giggles” owing to his hideous laugh, have been ripping out the hearts of their patients in a macabre attempt to return the doctor’s dead wife to life. The townspeople take it on themselves to put an end to the doctor’s heinous practice and Evan Jr. is carted off to the asylum.

  Thirty-five years later Evan Jr. (Larry Drake) escapes the institution in which he has spent nearly his entire life. In his bid for freedom, he performs a heart removal in front of the inmates, and then continues on his way to avenge the trauma inflicted by his hometown, just like Michael Myers before him. The Rendell family home is now dilapidated, having been deserted these thirty-five years past. With revenge in mind, the nervously giggling Rendell Jr. now assumes his father’s position and takes up residence in the abandoned house.

  Teenager Jennifer (Holly Marie Combs) is ailed by an undiagnosed heart condition and her life has just gone even further downhill: her father, Tom (Cliff De Young), has moved his girlfriend Tamara (Michelle Johnson) into their home. With the school term now at an end Jennifer and her boyfriend Max (Glenn Quinn), along with a group of friends, seek out some teenage kicks at the Rendell house, not realizing Jr. is back in town. For them it’s now too late; true to the slasher trope of the 1980s Rendell takes the group out one by one, this time using an array of medical instruments, each of which are only ever used once, surely in the interests of hygiene, and then begins his house calls, saving Jennifer for his final piece of surgery. The gore certainly splatters across the screen, with shredded flesh ripped and torn by this vile assemblage of implements, and in the spirit of Freddie Kreuger a mocking repartee of jokes accompanies each gruesome murder. The darkly comedic carnage brings death by blood pressure cuff, bladed thermometer, suffocation in the form of bandaging, castration, poisoning, lethal injections and a bizarre rotating drill inserted into the nasal cavity. Rendell Jr.’s imaginative quest for revenge knows no bounds.

  With Dr Giggles, Manny Coto produced a mean-spirited film reminiscent of the formulaic excess of the early eighties frenzy for slashers, but his proliferation of wickedly humorous one-liners insisted it was not to be taken too seriously. The film was unapologetic in acknowledging its grisly predecessors, again and again it has to be said, with Larry Drake excelling in the lead role as the deranged Rendell Jr. Dr Giggles never claimed to be original; rather, it was an unashamed homage to the films that had made the slasher genre so special for so much of the 1980s. A two-issue comic book adaptation of the film ensued, published by Dark Horse Comics, which varied to the version that finally appeared on screen due to it being based on an earlier draft of the script. Queen’s Brian May also stepped in to produce the score.

  AGROUP OF CHILDREN are watched as they happily play together, all except one. Lam appears a little withdrawn and bullied by his stepfamily; he also has a tendency to spy upon his parents as they make love and then catches glances of his stepsister as she takes a bath. He grows up to become a disturbed brooding individual, dogged by sexual inadequacy. He drives his taxi through rain-swept nights and then returns to the home of his stepsister to spend a little too much time alone in his room. While Lam and his family continue with their everyday lives, the police are investigating the discovery of a series of horribly disfigured bodies. By chance, a gruesome snapshot is found; then Lam’s tale begins to unfold using a sequence of flashbacks from the moment when he is arrested in a photography shop. Lam is another crusader with a message from God to remove the fallen women from the streets of Hong Kong. The scenes depicting his interrogation are brutal as the police extract his grisly confession. Battered and bruised Lam begins to reveal his murderous obsession, which he has seen fit to capture on videotape and in the hundreds of shocking photographs he had hidden away detailing dismemberment, mutilation and necrophilia. As payment for his appalling catalogue of crimes, Lam suffers at the merciless hands of the authorities and his own stepbrothers and sisters.

  Hong Kong’s celebrated Danny Lee made his directorial debut in a stylish movie that would have major bearing on the course of the region’s burgeoning film industry. His feature was based on a series of murders that terrorized Hong Kong in 1982, perpetrated by the former colony’s only convicted serial killer. A technician in a photo lab had processed one of Lam’s rolls of film and was shocked to find images of what appeared to be a woman’s mutilated breast; this turned out to be one of hundreds of similarly disgusting photographs depicting lacerations, body parts and alleged necrophilia. After several days of violent interrogation taxi driver Lam Gor-Yu admitted to this crime and then continued in his revelations on his murder of three other girls, each of whom he considered “bad and filthy”. He attempted to justify his actions by claiming his orders had come from God. He was later sentenced to lifelong imprisonment.

  Both Lee and his co-director Hin Sing “Billy” Tang worked with their cameraman Kin Fai Miu to fashion a series of haunting flashbacks that were swathed in exaggerated blues and reds to forge a sense of dread in Lam’s shadow-laden world and ensured every single frame taken in his room was meticulously considered. There was plenty of blood of guts on show in Dr Lamb, but the violence and brutality was nowhere near as excessive as the splatter observed in the following year’s The Untold Story. This, however, would not save their work from the scrutiny of the Hong Kong censors, who were only prepared to give it a Category III rating when several even more extreme shots were edited. There is, however, a very rare Spanish videotape which is alleged to contain the original uncut version, but its graphic scenes apparently only run to an extra fifteen seconds. Such was the impact of Dr Lamb, the flashback structure would be repeated in The Untold Story and the team’s scenes of rape and mutilation would be copied in Otto Chan Juk Tiu’s gore-drenched Diary of a Serial Killer (1995). With the demise of the American slasher and Italian splatter, the age of the extreme Hong Kong Category III was now about to dawn.

  WHEN JONATHAN HARKER (John Van Eyssen) arrives at the castle of Count Dracula, he comes upon a luscious young woman who claims she is being held prisoner. Before Harker can attend to her needs, the Count makes his first appearance and brusquely ushers the fatigued Harker to his room. In the confinement of his locked chambers, Harker begins to write his journal and we learn he has journeyed to Klausenberg to put an end to the evil Count’s reign of terror. In the days that follow, he again encounters the young woman and as she begs for help, her demeanour begins to change. To Harker’s shock, she becomes feral and sinks her teeth into his neck just as an enraged Dracula emerges from the shadows, baring his fangs. Soon after awakening the next day, he makes preparations and then armed with a stake he descends into the crypts beneath the castle. There he finds the coffins of Dracula and the temptress that gorged on his neck. He wastes no time in impaling the woman, but is too late to deal with Dracula, for the evil Count has already risen and is ready to defend himself.

  In the weeks that follow, Dr Van Helsing makes his way to Klausenberg. There he is presented with Harker’s journal and then at the castle discovers his friend has been killed by the Count. He returns to tell Arthur Holmwood and his wife Mina, the brother and sister-in-law of Harker’s fiancée Lucy Holmwood. Lucy appears to be ill, but as Dracula descends onto her terrace, we learn she too has fallen to this vampiric curse. Although Van Helsing does all he can to save the girl he knows she now belongs to the Count, giving him no option but to drive a stake through her heart. Van Helsing now has to return to Dracula’s castle in an effort to trace the Count’s coffin, but Mina too has been cursed by his deathly bite. Although Van Helsing and Arthur do all they can to watch over the ailing girl, Dracula enters her room and once again savours her blood. How
ever, the Count knows he must return to the security of his castle before sunrise and in his desperation tries to bury Mina, still barely alive, in the grounds adjacent to the crypts. Thankfully, Van Helsing and Arthur manage to thwart him, leading to a fateful altercation in the castle. When all seems lost, Van Helsing, in one of horror cinema’s most iconic moments, drags the curtain open to allow the sunlight to pour into the room; he then uses candlesticks to create a cross and forces Dracula into its glare. There is no hope for the Count as he crumbles into dust and as he does, Mina is seen to recover. As the film comes to an end, Dracula’s ashes are blown away in the wind, leaving only his ring to remind us of his wicked reign.

  While there were many changes to Bram Stoker’s original novel of 1897, Jimmy Sangster created a script that captured the essence of the Dracula myth as it pitted the venerable good against the very personification of evil. Under Terence Fisher’s splendid direction both Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing excelled, bringing a menace and charm to their roles as they led to one of Hammer’s most memorable finales. Bernard Robinson’s set designs enhanced the Gothic milieu, as the mists seen drifting across the graveyards worked to intensify the film’s foreboding allure. Along with its predecessor, The Curse of Frankenstein (1957), this set the tone for Hammer’s success for the next twenty years, combining the Count’s bloodthirsty lust with a sexual chemistry never before seen in cinema. Dracula was to have a major influence on the exploitation boom of the 1970s, paving the way for the eroticized flow of blood that immersed the extreme cinema of those years. To modern eyes, these bloody scenes appear somewhat tame, but in its day many of these scenes would have been considered unusually shocking.