ALTHOUGH LIONEL (ANDY Signore) puts a lot of effort into his janitorial duties for the Generico Corporation, he has become disgruntled by the belittling treatment he receives from the company’s staff. When he leaves work, he returns home where he lives with his janitor guru, Cornelius Growbo (Bruce Cronander). Infuriated by the conduct of those who work for the company he embarks on a series of sadistic reprisals aimed at those who refuse to afford him some respect. With the body count now escalating, an FBI agent is placed on the case, but Lionel’s rancour drives him on in his retaliatory crusade. The blood bath is brought to a halt when he falls for Hillary (Fiona MacIntyre), a recently widowed colleague. Sadly, for him she decides to leave the company, fearful she will become another of the killer’s victims. Her decision is upsetting, but it encourages Lionel to search for work elsewhere.
Later on while in the pub, he finds himself in the company of a group of gorgeous girls from the Tau Nu Alpha Sorority House who need someone to clean up after their parties and topless slumber gatherings. Lionel eagerly offers to take the job and rushes home to tell Mr Growbo of his change in fortune. Mr Growbo proves not to be such a good friend; he immediately slips off to the Sorority House and takes Lionel’s dream job from under his very nose. The embittered Lionel then takes out his anger on a couple of Generico’s employees who he discovers having sex in the reception area, but is caught by Willis, the new janitor (John Carreon). Willis, it turns out, is as deranged as Lionel, and wants a piece of the grisly action. The pair of them head to the sorority house to seek out their bloody revenge.
The Janitor was an independent low-budget slasher movie that delivered on both the queasy gore and irreverent comedy. First time directors T. J. Nordaker and Andy Signore never once intended for their film to be taken too seriously, but they deftly picked upon so many of the features that made the slasher comedies of the 1980s so successful and rehashed it for a new generation. The blood and guts flowed freely as did the hot girl action and they even dared to create a graphic parody of the celebrated Psycho shower scene.
THEOLOGY STUDENT SHIRO Shimuzu (Shigeru Amachi), along with his mysterious friend Tamura (Yoichi Numata), becomes an accessory to a hit-and-run accident, which results in the death of what may have been a Yakuza gangster. His guilt-ridden conscience insists that he give himself up to the police. However, when he tries to go to the authorities his taxi crashes, killing his girlfriend Yukiko (Utako Mitsuya). Shiro’s life becomes one of drink and despair and to make things worse he learns that his mother is terminally ill. He sets of, to the nursing home owned by his father, Gozo, in Tenjoen. When he enters the home, it resembles a vision of hell on earth, where, amidst the drunken painters and negligent doctors, he learns the truth about his adulterous father and meets Sachiko, a girl who looks exactly like his dead girlfriend. The distraught young man escapes the insanity of the home and makes his way along a railway line. As he continues his battle with his guilt, he is again confronted by the elusive Tamura, which leads to him being accosted by his dead girlfriend’s mother, intent on revenge. Very soon, Shiro will leave our world in a climax that sees the death of virtually all the residents in his father’s nursing home; then he faces that which lies beyond the gates of hell in a succession of extreme scenes, the likes of which had never before been seen in cinema across the globe.
Director Nobuo Nakagawa, described as the Japanese Alfred Hitchcock, funded much of his film Jigoku, which literally translates as “Hell”, with his own money. He was then fifty-five years old, and considered a veteran of Japanese cinema, when he created this daunting vision of hell, which entwined the Christian and Buddhist interpretations of eternal damnation. His thinking on this feature turned away from the traditional Japanese ghost stories for which he had previously acquired a very favourable reputation and instead produced a nihilist piece of Grand Guignol that was to provide the firmest of foundations for the excessive Japanese terrors to come. For the first part of his Faust inspired masterpiece he embellished his characters with considerable depth, lamenting on life and death, and then cast them into a surreal depiction of flayed flesh, spikes driven through jaws, torn limbs and disembowelled intestines. The cinematography created the strangest of hues to engender a world of torment that the reproachful Shiro would have to escape. Back in 1960, there was nothing in film that could quite be described as Jigoku’s match. It would inspire later remakes in 1979 and 1999, neither of which captured the bizarre premise of the original.
FORTY-YEAR-OLD JUAN HAS done virtually nothing with his life; his friend Lázaro, an army trained martial arts expert, can say the same thing. As a series of violent attacks pour through the streets of his hometown, the radio reports put the blame on Cuban dissidents paid by the US government. However, Juan and his friends soon realize their attackers are not normal human beings; the venom in their bite has the capacity to turn the victims into violent killers, whose numbers grow by the hour. In true Romero fashion, Juan soon learns the only way to bring them down is to destroy their brains. Our shrewd-minded hero also knows the best way to confront the situation is to turn his back on his socialist past and cash in on the situation. Seeing a window of opportunity his slogan becomes “Juan of the Dead, we kill your beloved ones”. Lázaro, along with his children Vladi and Camila, stand at Juan’s side ready to help people get rid of the menace that surrounds them . . . all of course for a reasonable price. The zombies are already running out of control, devouring flesh and, as they have in the past, ripping out guts. The people of a ravaged Havana look to leave the island and head out to sea. Juan, however, has no choice but to fight for his homeland, armed with a baseball bat and catapult.
There are suggestions that Alejandro Brugués’ gore-strewn action-packed black comedy, Juan de los Meurtos, could be Cuba’s first feature-length horror film as the government banned the production of horror and fantasy based films adjudging them to be detrimental to the political leanings and the social programme of the Cuban government. However, one of Brugués’ cast and crew, Jorge Molina, wrote and directed Ferozz: The Wild Red Riding Hood in 2010, a film steeped in witchcraft and Satanism that contains scenes comparable to the torture porn of more recent cinematic horror. Brugués defied his country’s social programme and grew up watching American zombie films, owning a copy of Sam Raimi’s The Evil Dead (1981), and saw the potential in the hopelessly resigned city of Havana. For fifty years the people of Cuba had lived with the prospect of a war with the United States; instead they face the mindless onslaught of the living dead. This was the zombie movie Brugués, a graduate of Cuba’s International School of Film and Television, had hoped to make. With the success of his film Personal Belongings (2006) he was able to negotiate enough backing to create a movie that would be considered a blockbuster by Cuban standards, with most of it coming from Spanish financiers and the state-owned Cuban Institute of Cinematographic Industry and Arts. His tight camera angles give the impression of an almost deserted city as the threat drives the populace away into the sea. As his team strove to make the film a success, Brugués almost ran into trouble with the police when they were summoned by the city’s municipal rubbish collectors, who found a zombie’s head mixed in with the refuse, which says much for the make-up effects.
A COUPLE OF HUNTERS come upon an abandoned church in a mountainside forest. When they cross its threshold to explore the interior they are confronted by a machete-wielding man who laughs heartily and then delivers a hack to the groin of one of the men. The other quickly makes his escape.
Five campers, Warren (Gregg Henry) the keep-fit enthusiast, his shy girlfriend Constance (Deborah Benson), Jonathon (Chris Lemmon), the girl-mad party animal, and his desirable girlfriend Megan (Jamie Rose), along with the geek cameraman, Daniel (Ralph Seymour), arrive in the mountains. They have ignored the warnings of forest ranger Roy McLean (George Kennedy) not to continue in the direction in which they are heading. Further along the way they come close to hitting the surviving hunter, who insists they turn round and drive awa
y. Once again they fail to take heed of this sound advice and look instead to set up camp. After an evening of lighthearted revelry they retire, all the while being watched by a presence in the woods. The following morning, they catch sight of a young girl named Merry Logan (Kati Powell) before she scampers into the forest. Later, as Megan swims naked in a pool, she assumes the hands that stroke her legs beneath the water belong to Jonathon, but he is already drying himself off. Panic immediately sets in, but she manages to swim to safety. There is something amiss in this beautiful spot, but the teenagers do not have the wherewithal to take any notice of the signs around them.
When Jonathon spots Merry and begins to chase her, he is forced to cross a roped bridge overhanging a fast-flowing river. As Merry manages to get further away, Jonathon is struck in the hand by a machete brandished by a malformed man whose incessant laughter makes this episode even more terrifying. The rope bridge breaks, and the youth falls into the turbulence below. In a bid to save himself he begins to climb, only to come face to face with the same man, who kicks him to his death down in the rapids. The killer then tracks down Megan and Daniel, who have found the church seen at the very beginning of the film. Daniel receives a fatal machete blow to the stomach and when Megan escapes into the church she is greeted by what appears to be the same man only to learn, shock of shocks, he is one of identical twins. Her discovery won’t save her as he begins to hack her to pieces with his trusted machete, while his deranged brother uses Daniel’s camera to commit their activities to film. While searching for the hapless campers the forest ranger Roy comes across Merry’s family, a barmy hillbilly father and a hushed mother who is also her sister. He reveals the homicidal twins are theirs, but they have no love for trespassers and now bear down on Warren and Constance. Constance’s sanity is now at stake.
It will come as no surprise to learn Jeff Lieberman regarded John Boorman’s Deliverance (1972) as being the main influence on his entry to the backwoods slasher genre, borne out by its release in France as Survivance. He still considers Just Before Dawn to be one of his own personal favourites and while it bears a thematic comparison to The Hills Have Eyes (1977), Lieberman maintains he hadn’t seen this movie at the time of filming. With so many slasher films gaining theatrical release, his film was just one of many and passed by very quietly. However, with the arrival of the video market it amassed a staunch following, gaining praise for its opulent cinematography, which did so much to capture the magnitude of this eerie locale, yet at the same time imposed a sense of claustrophobia seen in so many memorable horror movies. With an above average cast who were destined to achieve greater things, Lieberman had the chance to concentrate on generating the suspense and intensifying the atmosphere rather than relying solely on the exploitative violence preferred by so many of his contemporaries. Other forest-based blood baths would follow, but few would match the tension in Lieberman’s narrative.
SISTER GERTRUDE (ANITA Ekburg) is convalescing following neurosurgery on a brain tumour and feels she needs more time in which to recover, but her Mother Superior foolishly thinks otherwise. When she returns to her duties in the geriatric hospital, she soon becomes addicted to their supply of morphine as she tries to rid herself of the incessant headaches and then her schizophrenia once again begins to come to the fore. In her deranged state, she entices an impressionable young nun, Sister Mathilde (Paola Morra), into a lesbian affair, demanding that her lover wears silk stockings. She then dismisses the hospital’s doctor, leaving her free to torment the elderly patients, one of whom has her false teeth shattered by the maddened Gertrude. It isn’t long before a series of deaths occurs in the hospital with the deteriorating Gertude as the obvious suspect. She doesn’t help her situation when she visits a neighbouring town and after meeting a young man allows him to stand her up against the wall and take complete advantage of her willing body. Her Mother Superior must now intervene if this madness is to be brought to an end.
Giulio Berruti’s Suor Omicidi, also entitled Deadly Habit, was based on a series of murders and maltreatment in a geriatric home in the town of Wetteren in Flanders, Belgium, towards the end of 1977. Sister Godfrida of the Apostolic Congregation of St Joseph was accused of stealing more than $30,000 dollars from her elderly patients to support her morphine addiction. She also confessed to killing three patients with overdoses of insulin, because they had become difficult during the night, and was allegedly ripping out catheter tubes from bladders. Berruti’s film never quite captured the horror of these events in the predominantly Catholic region of Flanders, but it remains an intriguing addition to the nunsploitation phenomenon, which peaked during the 1970s, and whose cinematic origins can be traced back to a Scandinavian silent film Häxan (1922). Killer Nun is a hybrid of the sleazy nunsploitation cinema of the period and the popular giallo murder mystery, but appears restrained when it is trying to deliver the exploitation demanded of these particular genres. The gore was only ever implied, although the killings were appreciably sadistic, especially the torture with pins and the hypodermics administered to the face. This, coupled with former Miss Sweden Anita Ekberg’s strong performance, had Mary Whitehouse denounce Berruti’s film as a video nasty and it was banished to the Director of Public Prosecutions’ list of objectionable films in August 1984, only to be dropped in the July of the following year. When Killer Nun was submitted for its 1993 release to video, the scene detailing the torture of the old woman, with the close up of a needle piercing her eye and the scalpel lacerating her bandaged flesh, had to be removed. The merits in Giulio Berruti’s occasionally stylish direction were ignored, as was Alessandro Alessandroni’s compelling score; the DPP could see this was a very sleazy entry in the already bothersome exploitation genre. It would finally gain acceptance before the BBFC when it was presented for release to DVD in 2006. The scenes that had once caused offence now appeared dated and no longer contained their original shock value; as a result the film was finally released uncut.
A GROUP OF STUDENT friends Phoebe (Elaine Wilkes), Vivia (Sherry Willis-Burch) and Jennifer (Joanna Johnson) are delighted when they gain acceptance into their house sorority. On the night of the initiation, Vivia had played a prank on the sisterhood, which is why she and her friends were so readily accepted. Now she must engage in a similar escapade at a party planned by her sorority sisters for a neighbouring fraternity in an old house, which twenty years before had also been home to a similar fraternity. The sisters cajole their housemother into letting them celebrate in the abandoned house. Before the girls make their way to the house, the housemother decides to pay a visit to ensure it is still safe. In the overgrown garden to the front of the manse she stands over a grave and talks to someone called Allan, explaining why she is allowing the girls to have their party and tells him what happened all those years ago was merely an accident. As she attends to an unsteady banister, a mysterious figure, who is obviously someone of her acquaint, appears before her and bludgeons her to death. The girls remain unaware of this fatal occurrence and begin to decorate the old house for their April Fool’s Day party and at the same time prepare some mischief. Poor Jennifer has serious misgivings about the house’s dark past, but the party goes ahead. Once the festivities get under way the guests begin to fall foul of the killer seen earlier on the stairs. He stalks the house dressed in a deep-sea diver’s suit employing a hammer, a pitchfork, a corkscrew and a guillotine to dispose of his victims. In a twist that sets it apart from so many slashers of the era, an evil spirit sweeps through the house turning Jennifer into a demonic creature, akin to The Evil Dead, that crawls around the chandeliers and across the ceilings before it too joins in with the butchery.
Canadian director William Fruett had directed the controversial, but later acclaimed, violent horror Death Weekend, which also goes by the name House by the Lake (1976). Filming on Killer Party is claimed to have started in 1978, but as it neared completion the budget became exhausted and production was ceased until 1984, when it was finally finished only to languish for a
nother two years before receiving a limited theatrical release by MGM. This version was severely edited, removing much of the gore seen in the original cut. The title was also altered from The April Fools to Killer Party because the distributors were concerned that it could be confused with the darkly comedic April Fool’s Day released that same year. When it saw release in 1986, the slasher years were almost over and the set pieces appeared clichéd; yet if, as it is claimed, this was originally shot in 1978, it could have been a highly influential movie and bears certain similarities to Hell Night (1981). Killer Party has become another rarity from the 1980s, and is currently only officially available in the VHS format.
THE INSPIRATION FOR Wes Craven’s controversial The Last House on the Left goes back to the thirteenth-century Swedish ballad “Töres dotter i Wänge”, first adapted for the cinema by Ingmar Bergman for his film The Virgin Spring (1960). Bergman soon after received an Academy Award for his achievement as Best Foreign Film. Craven’s vicious offspring certainly remains a landmark in its own right, but was adjudged as being cold and dispassionate in its violent portrayal and was never going to be considered for an Academy Award.
The Mammoth Book of Slasher Movies (Mammoth Books) Page 30
