The Unrepentant Cinephile

by Jason Coffman

  New Year’s Evil is a seriously goofy slasher film, punctuated with too-long songs and laugh-out-loud lapses in character and filmmaker judgment. In other words, it’s a perfect film to watch in a group, preferably with plenty of beer on hand. It may be more of a footnote in horror film history than a genuine classic, but it’s really fun and well worth a look. The DVD includes the film’s theatrical trailer, but as with pretty much all of the MGM Limited Edition Collection titles, it’s worth just having such an obscure film in a decent transfer, so the bare-bones presentation really doesn’t matter. If you’re an 80s slasher completist or a Golan-Globus fanatic, you’ll want to have this in your DVD collection!

  The Night Before Easter (2014)

  Originally posted on Daily Grindhouse 29 April 2014

  Traditionally, when someone gets the itch to make an independent horror film, they tend to aim for one of two broad categories: zombie movies and slasher films. The increasingly affordable nature of high-definition consumer video equipment has led to a boom in both of these subgenres over the last several years, with tons of hopeful next Romeros and Carpenters trying their hand at making a film with as little money as possible. As with any trend, this has resulted in some great films and more than a few really awful ones, mostly due to the fact that just because decent cameras are cheaper doesn’t mean a good movie is guaranteed to come out the other side. Many independent productions have their heart in the right place, but fall hard when it comes to technical basics. Such is the case with The Night Before Easter, the debut feature from filmmakers Joseph Henson and Nathan Johnson.

  Henson and Johnson have the basics down: after a pre-credits sequence in which a teasing babysitter and her horny boyfriend are murdered by a guy in an Easter Bunny suit, the action jumps ahead to ten years later. Kelly (Emily Chidalek) has invited all of her friends to an overnight party in a storage facility to announce that she is moving out of their small town to London. Her secondary reason for the party is to finally confess her feelings to Riley (Eric Wyatt), who she’s been crushing on for years. Riley has no idea and accidentally throws a wrench into her plans by inviting his new girlfriend Melissa (Bonnie Marilyn Jean), who seems to be Kelly’s mortal enemy. Once Melissa arrives, tensions begin to mount, and the body count starts shortly thereafter: the Easter Bunny-suited murderer has escaped from the sanitarium again and made his way to the storage facility. Who will survive, and whose head will end up in an Easter basket?

  The Night Before Easter is obviously made by people who love slasher films, but it is plagued with technical issues. One glaring problem that pops up throughout the film is incorrect focus, where the object of the shot (usually someone speaking) is slightly out of focus and the objects behind them are not. The storage facility offers a great location for the film’s action, but it’s almost entirely white and lit with bright fluorescent bulbs, so often characters will be dark and hard to see while the background blazes bright white. The sound is thankfully not that bad, and most of the dialogue is mixed well and right at the top of the mix where it needs to be—it must have been a nightmare to get good sound recording in that storage place, so extra points to the filmmakers for wrestling that down into a decent mix not overwhelmed by echo and other extraneous noise. The original score is also pretty solid, effectively evoking 80s-era synth scores, and is honestly the best thing about the film.

  Technical issues are much easier to overlook if a film has interesting characters, but unfortunately this is another area where The Night Before Easter falters a bit. The entire film runs 65 minutes (including opening and ending credits), and the first murder after the pre-credits sequence doesn’t happen until past the 30-minute mark. Before then, we watch Kelly and her friends sit around, talk, and drink “beer” (clearly IBC Root Beer bottles, which a viewer may find endearingly goofy or just goofy depending on their sensibilities) for a very long time. This time is meant for the audience to identify with the characters and find people to root for, but as with too many modern slashers, the characters just aren’t that interesting. Even when Melissa shows up and brings some welcome superbitch realness to spice things up, it’s a bit too little, way too late. There are some bright spots to the cast, but most of their characters just aren’t defined enough to make the audience care about them.

  Still, what matters most to slasher fans is how well the film handles its kills. The Night Before Easter is all over the place in this regard, sometimes keeping everything entirely off-screen until showing a body and other times letting the action play out on the screen. For what was clearly a no-budget film, a few of the kills are handled competently, but for the most part they are as clumsy as the film’s attempts at characterization. One can’t help but think that having a guy in a white Easter Bunny suit shot against a series of bright white walls would make his bloody suit nice to look at as the body count ticks up, but it seems like the filmmakers couldn’t afford to get any blood on the suit, as it manages to make it all the way to the end credits without getting stained.

  It’s great to see filmmakers take the initiative and complete a film, which is always a huge, difficult undertaking. And it’s especially noteworthy given what was clearly a miniscule budget. However, The Night Before Easter is just too unpolished for anyone but the most forgiving slasher fan, falling deep into the middle of the pack of the legions of no-budget features that continue to appear on the indie horror landscape. Hopefully Henson and Johnson can take what they’ve learned on this film and apply those lessons to their next project; considering what they accomplished with their meager resources here, it will be interesting to see what they do next.

  The Night of the Devils (1972)

  Originally published on Film Monthly 22 November 2012

  Since launching their US imprint, Raro Video has consistently delivered excellent releases of little-seen Italian films that had somehow eluded legitimate releases here in the States. Their DVD releases of such rarities as The Perfume of the Lady in Black and To Be Twenty nicely complemented their slate of lesser-known works by major names in Italian cinema (such as Federico Fellini’s The Clowns). And, best of all, Raro gives each release an attention to detail more in line with Criterion than a company frequently issuing obscure Italian genre cinema. Their sterling track record continues with their new DVD and Blu-ray release of Giorgio Ferroni’s The Night of the Devils (La Notte dei Diavoli).

  Nicola (Gianni Garko) staggers out of the woods and collapses in a stream, where he is discovered and taken to an institution. He is unable to speak, and the doctors and nurses have no luck figuring out where he came from until the sudden late-night appearance of Sdenka (Agostina Belli). Sdenka speaks to a doctor and tells him what little she knows of Nicola: that he is a businessman who lost his way in the woods where she lived with her family, and that after a car accident he became lost and ended up at the house. Soon after, Sdenka disappears, leaving the doctors scrambling to find her and learn more about Nicola, who begins to have flashbacks of the strange events that occurred in the woods.

  After Nicola’s arrival, the curse that afflicts Sdenka’s family comes to full fruition as Nicola falls in love with Sdenka yet is powerless to help. As each member of the family disappears, they return as vampiric monsters to take another member along with them. If this sounds familiar, it is because The Night of the Devils is based on the same story that formed the basis of the last segment of Mario Bava’s Black Sabbath: Tolstoy’s “The Wurdulak.” In the present, a frantic Nicola searches the hospital for Sdenka, while the parallel flashbacks tell the story of his confrontation with the evil that cursed her family.

  The Night of the Devils may not be quite as visually captivating as Bava’s take on the material, but it’s still a powerfully creepy tale, and director Ferroni gives the story a very unique style. The pacing is a bit on the slow side, but that’s not necessarily a complaint; this is a textbook slow burn punctuated by moments of shocking violence and unsettling imagery. Raro, true to form, has given the film a gorgeous tran
sfer and interesting extras. An especially nice touch is the fact that the film has completely different artwork on the O-card in which the case is packaged than the artwork in the case itself. The 12-page booklet included with the film features an essay by Chris Alexander and an interview with the film’s composer Giorgio Gaslini. Well worth seeking out on its own merits, The Night of the Devils becomes a must-have for any fan of 70s Italian horror thanks to Raro’s exemplary presentation.

  Nightmares (1980)

  Originally published on Film Monthly 2 August 2011

  One of the best things about the rise of DVD has been the appearance of numerous smaller companies run by film fanatics which specialize in releasing forgotten or overlooked films. Companies like Code Red, Blue Underground, and Synapse Films all valiantly do their part to make sure weird exploitation obscurities are committed to digital versatile disc for future generations to enjoy. Severin Films is one of the most consistently interesting of these companies, and they deliver once again with their excellent new release of the 1980 Australian exploitation horror film Nightmares (aka Stage Fright).

  Jenny Neumann stars in Nightmares as Helen Selleck, a seriously disturbed young woman who auditions for a stage play. Helen is unbalanced, and for good reason: as a child, she was involved in a car accident that killed her mother and possibly her mother’s lover. Inexplicably, her father blamed Helen for her mother’s death, and as an adult Helen associates sex with death. She suffers from nightmares in which she stalks lovers around the theater and brutally murders them– or are they something other than nightmares? Is Helen really the anonymous black-gloved murderess of her nightmares?

  The answer to that is never really in question, as director John D. Lamond (perhaps best known for the Emmanuelle-esque coming-of-age film Felicity) is clearly more interested in getting as much naked skin and blood on the screen as possible than in any kind of traditional story concerns. The film plays out very much like a hybrid of the Italian Giallo film and a standard slasher movie, down to the black-gloved hands of the murderer and the first-person viewpoints of the murders. Anyone expecting any real mystery or even a reasonably coherent storyline is going to be sorely disappointed, but what Nightmares lacks in coherence it makes up for in atmosphere and lurid thrills.

  Chances are good that video store aficionados of a certain age will remember seeing some form of Nightmares on VHS in the 80s, and Severin’s beautiful new DVD release offers a strong incentive to add this nasty minor Ozploitation classic to their collection (or upgrade from that old tape). In addition to a full-length commentary track with Lamond, this DVD includes a 15-minute featurette on the history of the slasher film and a collection of trailers for Lamond’s other films. Hats off to Severin for a great job on this release and here’s hoping there are more lost gems on the horizon.

  Nobody Gets Out Alive (2012)

  Originally published on Film Monthly 28 February 2013

  Film technology keeps getting cheaper and cheaper, and more and more people crank out more and more movies every day. A lot of these are takes on familiar tropes, and “kids in the woods with a killer” is a highly popular one since it only requires a few things: “kids,” woods, some fake blood. It’s such a well-established type of story that pretty much anybody could make it into a film, and a lot of first-time filmmakers do just that. The problem is making this kind of film and doing something actually interesting with it. We are now in a post-Cabin in the Woods horror film landscape. If you’re going to make a “kids in the woods” movie, you’d better have a hell of a hook to make it stand out from all the others.

  Which brings us, conveniently, to Nobody Gets Out Alive. This is a film in which a bunch of “teenagers” go into the woods to party and get killed. There are two bros, three girls, and one weird guy who everyone hates who stands in for the “nerdy guy” type who always (inexplicably) tags along for these kinds of weekends. This is all very familiar territory. What makes Nobody Gets Out Alive interesting for its first half is the fact that it feels like a computer was fed parameters for making a horror movie– character types, story beats, etc.– and then given basic rules of speech and grammar, which it then used to spit out the film’s screenplay. Our heroine is a young girl named Jenn (Jen Dance) who, as the film opens, is being released after an extended stay in the hospital for some undisclosed illness; this scene serves no purpose other than to give Clint Howard a few lines as her doctor. Jenn’s parents bring her home and immediately demand that she get out of the house and spend time with her friends so she doesn’t become an agoraphobic. This does not follow, say, a montage of Jenn hanging out, isolated in her room and lonely. It is established in the dialogue that Jenn is literally brought home from the hospital and her parents force her to go on a camping trip with her friends the same day.

  Thus the film starts with its characters already behaving completely unlike human beings. Every conversation in the film sounds like the randomly generated dialogue between non-player characters in a Grand Theft Auto game. One person talks, the next person responds with something that may or may not be related, repeat. The word “retarded” gets trotted out repeatedly. For quite a good chunk of time, it really seems like Nobody Gets Out Alive may be some sort of performance art prank or a particularly weird satire of slasher films. Unfortunately, this is not the case. Once the “teenagers” start getting knocked off, Nobody Gets Out Alive turns into another mean-spirited slasher and settles into depressingly comfortable formula very quickly: People run around dark woods, people get killed, repeat until inevitable rote “surprise” ending.

  The old “kids in the woods” trope can still be an interesting place to start for a film. There are any number of small films that take this concept and do something really interesting with it– Wilderness Survival for Girls always comes to mind when discussing this– but it is no longer worthwhile to just go through the same motions from countless other slasher films and expect the horror audience to accept it. People can always just go back and watch Friday the 13th again. Is it possible to make a genuinely good slasher film by “going back to basics?” Almost certainly. But Nobody Gets Out Alive isn’t the best argument for it. It may have been a good exercise for its filmmakers to learn the filmmaking process and how to do effective practical effects on a budget, but there’s no real reason for anyone else to watch it.

  Nothing Bad Can Happen (2013)

  Originally published on Film Monthly 15 October 2014

  Drafthouse Films has built up quite a reputation for themselves in a relatively short time thanks to their excellent selection of restored classics (such as Abel Ferrara’s Ms. 45), unearthed obscurities (Miami Connection), and new films ranging from surreal comedy to compelling documentaries. Building on the popularity of the Alamo Drafthouse Cinemas chain, Drafthouse Films has become an imprint that film fans pay close attention to, and they are willing to take risks on films other distributors would balk at. Such is certainly the case with Nothing Bad Can Happen, which Drafthouse picked up after a successful film festival run.

  Tore (Julius Feldmeier) is a newly baptized Christian, a teenager living in a church commune that calls themselves the “Jesus Freaks.” One day he and a friend happen upon Benno (Sascha Alexander Gersak) and his family, stranded with engine trouble. Tore and his friend pray over the car and it starts, and Tore invites Benno to the Jesus Freaks’s weekly service. Benno shows up and sees Tore having a seizure during the musical performance of the Jesus Freaks’s in-house band, and takes Tore home to recover. Tore begins spending more and more time with Benno and his family: his wife Astrid (Annika Kuhl) and stepchildren Sanny (Swantje Kohlhof) and Dennis (Til-Niklas Theinert). Benno gives Tore a tent, and Tore agrees to take care of the garden.

  Things quickly go south when Tore notices Benno paying inappropriate attention to 14-year-old Sanny, and after a nasty confrontation, Tore decides that God has sent him to the family to protect Sanny from Benno. What follows from this point is a horrific battle of wills as Benno submits Tor
e to increasingly brutal punishments, trying to either get him to leave, renounce his faith, or both. Benno’s cruelty is infectious, and soon Astrid is helping him devise punishments and even grade-schooler Dennis takes to pissing on Tore’s tent. Only Sanny has any empathy for Tore, and although she begs him to leave and stay away, Tore believes he is on a divine mission and continues to stay with the family no matter what happens to him. And Benno makes certain plenty happens to Tore.

  Based on true events, Nothing Bad Can Happen is a brutal and heartbreaking debut from filmmaker Katrin Gebbe. She takes Tore’s faith very seriously, and neither Tore nor his zealous faith are ever portrayed as anything but completely sincere. Julius Feldmeier gives a fantastic performance as Tore, investing him with a real humanity and making his faith completely believable. There are moments of happiness and quiet beauty throughout the film, balancing its gruesome extremes, and Gebbe walks a careful line between exploitation and serious examination of the characters of Benno and Tore and the circumstances leading to Tore’s ultimate fate. Nothing Bad Can Happen is not an easy film to watch, but it is beautifully made and will provide viewers with a lot to discuss afterward. Cheers to Drafthouse Films for taking a chance on such a difficult film, and here’s looking forward to their future releases and whatever Katrin Gebbe does next.