The Mammoth Book of Slasher Movies (Mammoth Books)

by Peter Normanton

  During the prologue, we are told the events in this story are based on an incident that actually happened, but conjecture remains as to the truth behind this statement. The Cohen Brothers later made a similar declaration in the preamble to their movie Fargo (1996), the impact of which would have a major bearing on the audience reaction to the staging of certain scenes. Craven boldly set out to exaggerate the shocks in what proved to be a very disturbing piece of cinema. On the eve of her seventeenth birthday, Mari Collingwood plans to travel to New York to see the underground band Bloodlust, accompanied by her close friend Phyllis Stone. As she heads off in the family car, a couple of sadistic prison escapees, Krug Stillo, a rapist and serial killer, along with Fred “Weasel” Podowski, a child molester and murderer, are hiding out with their partner Sadie (Jeramie Rain) and Krug’s drug-addicted son, Junior Stillo (Marc Sheffler).

  After the gig, the two girls try to score some marijuana. Their wayward mission leads them to Junior who makes them an offer of Colombian grass if they will come back to his apartment. Once inside they are overcome by the two escaped criminals and their accomplice Sadie. Phyllis does her best to resist, but is punched in the stomach and brutally raped. The repulsive scene is juxtaposed with the parents of Mari and their preparations for her surprise party.

  When morning comes, the girls’ ordeal continues as they are imprisoned in the boot of the gang’s car and driven away to the countryside, as they journey north to Canada. In a strange twist of fate, their vehicle breaks down in front of Mari’s house as the police are following up on the reports of the girls’ disappearance. When the gang realize there is no chance of getting the car repaired, they drag the kidnapped girls into the woods and then begins the cruel torture with appalling beatings, urination and forced lesbian sex. After trying to escape, Phyllis is tracked to a nearby cemetery, where Weasel plunges his knife into her back, shortly before the rest of the gang catch up to continue the merciless assault and then eviscerate her. Moments later, her severed hand is presented to Mari, as she endures the humiliation of having the evil Krug’s name carved into her chest before being raped and shot as she attempts to make her escape along a lakeside.

  Craven hasn’t finished with his audience yet. Having changed their clothes the gang arrive at the Collingwoods’ home, introducing themselves as travelling salesmen. In a series of tense scenes, Mari’s mother Estelle discovers the gang’s involvement with her daughter’s disappearance. She and her husband flee the house and scurry into the woods, where they find Mari next to the lake only just alive. The poor girl tells of their ordeal and then dies. The enraged parents carry their daughter’s body back to the house as the stimulus behind the violence now shifts from being gratuitous to bloody revenge. Ironically, it was Krug’s slaughter at the hands of the incensed chainsaw-wielding Doctor Collingwood which proved to be one the most sadistic moments in the entire film.

  Written by Wes Craven in 1971 as Night of Vengeance, the original concept was far more graphic than the film that finally saw completion. Soon after shooting began, the decision was taken to tone down the excess Craven had first envisaged to make for what the production team considered as being a much softer film. While this was going on, their exploitative brainchild went through many name changes, including Sex Crime of the Century, Krug and Company and The Men’s Room. The film’s infamy was made all the worse as its debut came only a few years after the infamous Manson Family massacre. This series of grisly murders had sent shockwaves across the United States; their ferocity presented an unsettling reflection of a part of the American way of life many would have preferred to have forgotten and raised concerns as to the erosion of family values.

  There was nothing new about the idea of a revenge movie, but this was infinitely more vicious than anything that had been seen before and paved the way for films such as Death Wish (1974) and the equally contentious I Spit on Your Grave (1978). Craven’s movie also attracted the attention of the censors, particularly in the United Kingdom. The film was refused a certificate for cinema release by the BBFC in 1974 owing to its sadism and violence. However, when home video arrived in the early 1980s it saw a release with very few cuts. At this time a video did not fall under the jurisdiction of the BBFC, but this loophole in the legislation generated the video nasty scare that began in 1982, backed by the tabloids and culminated in the Video Recordings Act of 1984. The film was now banned, and it took its place on the Director of Public Prosecutions’ list of inflammatory video nasties. For The Last House on the Left the ban remained in place for the remainder of the 1980s and on into the 1990s. Its standing as a video nasty, however, inevitably elevated it to a status of cult notoriety. Blue Underground Limited toured an uncut print around Britain without the consent of the BBFC, with Southampton City Council granting this version their “18” certificate in the hope of overcoming the ongoing problems with the BBFC stance on certification. It was later granted a licence for a one-off showing in Leicester in June 2000, but the BBFC remained steadfast.

  The dispute continued with the BBFC winning an appeal in June 2002 made to the Video Appeals Committee (VAC) by video distributor Blue Underground Limited. The BBFC had insisted sixteen seconds of cuts to scenes of sexual violence before the video could be given an “18” certificate. Blue Underground Limited stood their ground refusing to make the cuts, so the BBFC again rejected the video. The distributor then appealed to the VAC, who upheld the BBFC’s decision. During the appeal, film critic Mark Kermode was called in as a horror expert to make a case for the film’s historical importance. However, after his report, the committee not only upheld the cuts but actually increased them, with the film being granted an “18” certificate with thirty-one seconds of cuts in July 2002. It was released in the UK on DVD in the May of the following year. Those scenes that fell foul of the BBFC were made available as a slideshow extra on the disc; in addition a web-link was provided to a website from where the cut scenes could be viewed. Finally, in March 2008 the BBFC classified the film uncut for video, thirty-six years after it had first been released to American theatres. A year later Rogue Pictures released a remake with Wes Craven as producer, now without the hullabaloo that surrounded the original.

  SHARP DRESSED THEY may be, but these three men, Steele (Jack Canon), Lomax (Ray Green) and Billy (Frederick R. Friedel), have murder in mind as they lie in wait to repay a friend’s betrayal. When Audrey arrives, accompanied by his gay lover, the gang force a lit cigar into his throat and then Steele and Lomax systematically beat him to death. His lover narrowly escapes via the window but Audrey is left for dead on the floor. Steele and his accomplices then quickly depart the city to avoid police detection, heading into the remote countryside. During the course of their journey, they terrorize an innocent shopkeeper and then force a teenage girl (Carol Miller) to strip before they take aim at the apples placed on her head. Their travels take them to an isolated farmhouse where they find a reclusive girl, Lisa (Leslie Lee), who looks after her wheelchair-bound grandfather (Douglas Powers). Safe in the knowledge that this is an easy number, the hoodlums decide to stay for the night. In the night, Lomax becomes interested in the girl and tries to rape her. To his shock, she pulls a razor from her bedside table and soon graduates to the virtues of a sharpened axe. Although much of the violence takes place off screen, the silent girl makes able use of her axe as she slays each one of her assailants, with blood recurrently splattering across the screen.

  Shot in only ten days on film that was purchased as surplus stock from filmmakers of more substantial repute, Lisa, Lisa became more commonly known as Axe, and has also gone by several different aliases including, California Axe Massacre, The Axe Murders, California Axe Murders and the emotive The Virgin Slaughter. Frederick Friedel’s feature was another low-budget exploitation movie very much in the tradition of Last House on the Left (1972), which for many years has been maligned for its awkward camera techniques and flawed storyline. However, the gaps in this account rest with the distributor whose deman
ds meant much of his film was left on the cutting room floor. Their intention was to present a feature for the drive-ins on a bill with two or three other movies; so Friedel had little choice but to cut it down to the bone. This destroyed any attempt at credible characterization and consequently led to annoying omissions in the narrative flow, but those who were paying their money at the drive-ins were rarely concerned with such trivialities.

  Friedel’s film would have drifted into obscurity if had not been released to video in the UK during the troubled year of 1982. As the crusading tabloid gathered steam, it became another feature to be labelled as a video nasty, on this occasion in September 1984. There it would remain, as one of thirty-nine films deemed too offensive to see release on these shores. The cover to the video made available in the UK became immediately problematic when it alleged that Lisa’s age was only thirteen, although this was never actually inferred anywhere in Friedel’s movie. This surely can be the only reason why Lisa, Lisa caused such a stir, for although its content was undeniably exploitative, the violence occurred away from the camera’s gaze. It remained unavailable for over twenty years until its mastering to DVD in 2005.

  WHILE RIDING THROUGH the Lake District to escape the madness of London city life, George (Ray Lovelock) becomes stranded when his motorbike accidentally collides with Edna’s (Cristina Galbó) car. She is en route to a hospital to have her drug-addicted sister Katie admitted for treatment. Close to the scene of the accident, a group of agricultural scientists are experimenting with ultra-sonic radiation designed to deter the insects in the surrounding area. Their experimentation has a shocking side effect: the recently deceased begin to rise from their graves and shamble through town, slaughtering and then gorging on their victims. George and Edna try to alert the local constabulary but the bigoted sergeant (Arthur Kennedy) appears more interested in arresting the young couple, for little more than their outlandish appearance. While there are probably no more than a half dozen zombies actually ever seen in the film, the viewer would be unwise to underestimate their murderous potential. This mob proves to be unusually strong and reveals itself eager for blood as one young nurse discovers prior to her breasts being torn off and her stomach ripped to pieces. As their numbers begin to grow, armed with tombstones the zombies try to break down the church door in a nail-biting cemetery sequence before the final bloody showdown, in what purports to be the Manchester Morgue.

  In the wake of his Spanish terror Ceremonia Sangrienta (1973), released as Blood Castle, Jorge Grau was asked to make The Living Dead at the Manchester Morgue. Originally entitled Non si Deve Profanare il Sonno dei Morti, before going on to be released as Let Sleeping Corpses Lie, The Living Dead, Breakfast at the Manchester Morgue, Don’t Open the Window and Zombi 3, it was intended to cash in on George A. Romero’s unexpected success on Night of the Living Dead (1968). Rather than resorting to simple exploitation, Grau carefully considered this premise to create a film that captured both the influence of Hammer’s masterpieces and the Italian terrors of the day. Although his zombies were in no way as visually terrifying as those unleashed by Romero and Lucio Fulci, there was no denying the threat in their shambling gait as they staggered with bloodthirsty intent through the English Lake District. This was an unusual collaboration, bringing together an Italian/Spanish team in the countryside of the north west of England, but Grau’s crew managed to give this ordinarily picturesque locale a sense of decay that perfectly suited the mood of his film. A black humour would pervade the grisly capers of the zombie horde as it began to go forth and multiply more than twenty-five years before the infected destroyed the entire country in Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later (2002). The graphic gore and violence caused problems during the film’s initial submission to the BBFC in 1975; one minute and twenty-seven seconds of cuts were demanded before an “X” certification would be issued. When the film appeared on video in 1983, it was bound to invite the attention of the DPP and by October 1983 had been prosecuted and listed as a video nasty. It wouldn’t be until the April of 1985 that The Living Dead at the Manchester Morgue was removed from the offending list. The VHS release of that year then had to comply with another twenty-six seconds of cuts to those already prescribed in 1975. This meant removing shots of a police officer’s mutilated body, a complete cut on all flesh eating, eliminating footage of burning zombies, edits to the entire scene depicting the Doctor’s murder by an axe and the excessively gory attack on the nurse. When Grau’s film was again considered for release in 2002 all of the previous BBFC cuts were thankfully waived.

  AS SHE LIES in the sun, enjoying an afternoon of peaceful solitude, a young girl is knocked unconscious by a crazy in a mask. He drags her body away, and hides it in the bushes and then ties her up. Sometime later, he returns with a lawn mower to carry out the first of a series of gruesome murders, akin to so much of the exploitation cinema of the period. Inspector James Cameron (John Smihula) is the hard-edged cop assigned to bring the girl’s killer to justice. The trail leads him to a woman’s decapitated head that has been discarded on a beach. When he fails to get the support he needs from his superiors, he quits the force but very soon finds himself in a descent into a deranged world of torture, slaughter and cannibalism. The masked man and his evil accomplice are chain-sawing and chopping up their victims’ bodies, all of whom just happen to be young girls. Their entrails are then sold to a young man, who in turn feeds them to his cannibalistic leprous father and his flesh-eating associates. Cameron had best beware – the father is getting ever stronger by the day.

  Nathan Schiff has a reputation for being a next-to-no-budget gore director, shooting his early films on Super 8 mm. To modern eyes, they appear murky, resembling the homemade films of weekend family get-togethers, which is probably all they were ever intended as being. His previous film Weasels Rip My Flesh (1979), made at the tender age of sixteen for just $400, was a homage to the B-movie science fiction of the 1950s; its meagre success generated just enough money to allow him to produce The Long Island Cannibal Massacre. There was no denying the young Schiff’s enthusiasm as he combined many features of the emerging trend for slashers and threw in the splatter of Romero and Fulci’s gut munching. The gratuitous gore effects were an exercise in pure imagination, using pig intestines, fish heads, and condoms. Sadly, the acting wasn’t to match the director’s gusto and the dialogue was at times absurd, but this was a line of horror that honoured the insane tradition of Herschell Gordon Lewis. So much so, his homemade offerings were given midnight screenings in Manhattan, where they garnered a degree of notoriety, which many years later led to his film being released to DVD.

  EIGHT YEARS AGO, John Lucker went on a killing spree, claiming the lives of eight women. Soon after his capture the details of his perverse crimes were revealed, which led to a lifelong sentence in a mental facility. After a failed suicide attempt, he awakes from a coma, rapes and kills two nurses, before fleeing the private clinic in which he has been imprisoned. While on the run, he learns that one of his victims, Cathy Jordan, survived her ordeal. Lucker becomes incensed at her still being alive and the psychotic lust that left eight women for dead all those years ago once again rises to the surface. As he tries to find Cathy, he takes to killing more women, one of whom he keeps for a week before succouring his necrophilic craving. When he finally catches up with Cathy, so begins her psychological torment.

  Twenty-five-year-old film student Johan Vandewoestijne wasn’t overly keen to divulge the true nature of his script when he looked to finance this little venture. It was hardly surprising; the repulsive John Lucker proved to be one of the sickest villains to emerge in a decade that had given birth to so many other perverted maniacs. The prolonged scenes of necrophilia detailing his violation of the putrescent slime-covered corpse were shot a full twelve months before Jörg Buttgereit paraded his hideous spectacle in the lauded Nekromantik (1987). Vandewoestijne’s direction appeared to have an unholy delight for the maggots and worms that had buried their way into the rotting carcass, which
only a week before had been an attractive young woman. This stomach-turning sequence culminated in the now infamous “finger licking good” episode that continues to both shock and amuse its audience. Vandewoestijne’s film was always intended as a low-budget piece of exploitation, feverishly endeavouring to disturb with its violence and explicit displays of misogyny. The outrageous content consigned it to the world of underground cinema, a place reserved only for the most audacious in cinematic excess. Lucker the Necrophagous could have very easily disappeared without trace, for the producer destroyed virtually all of the negatives once the film had been completed. The original movie was considerably longer, featuring an investigative journalist who got a little too close to the Lucker mythos. Due to its sordid nature, its release to VHS was extremely limited, making it one of the most sought after collector’s pieces of the period. When it was recently restored to DVD, the process proved to be extremely problematic, but the final cut has remained true to its grimy underground infamy of twenty-five years past.

  JULIA (TRISH EVERLY) teaches in a school for the deaf in Savannah, Georgia. As she looks forward to her twenty-fifth birthday celebrations, her hideously deformed twin sister Mary (Allison Biggers) resides in the mental ward of the nearby hospital. When they were children, Mary used to take pleasure in inflicting harm on her sister, especially on their birthday. Thankfully, the beautiful Julia has managed to come to terms with this unhappy period of her life and has since gone on to become an adored teacher at the school. With both of their parents now dead, they have only one surviving relative, their uncle, Father James. He appeals to Julia to go to see her sister, but her visit only rekindles Mary’s malice and she swears to make Julia “suffer as she had suffered”. Upset, Julia returns to her home, a renovated manse that has been converted into apartments. This choice of house was rather interesting, for it was actually supposed to be haunted, thus adding to the film’s eerie air. When Mary escapes only days before their birthday, a succession of murders soon ensue. Her choice of weapon was somewhat different from those relished by her contemporaries, but proved just as controversial. She kept at her side a snarling Rottweiler, who gorged his victims’ throats and viciously savaged their hands. The evil pet was to receive its just deserts when it burst headfirst through a door to be put out of its misery by a handy power drill. The finale is remarkably similar to that observed in Happy Birthday To Me, the Canadian slasher released at the same time, but no one has ever been able to determine who exactly copied who.