The Pagemaster (1994)

"Just because something is a part of my childhood," writes Tommy Nelson on IMDb, "doesn't mean it's good." I must somewhat guiltily admit that I agree with Tommy. The Pagemaster was one of the movies of my sunny Cambridgeshire-based '90s childhood, with basically everybody I knew owning a copy on VHS, and all of us watching it, joyously and frequently. My copy had a Making Of featurette after the movie, which I would watch, fascinated. My stepmother would ask why the hell I wanted to watch that, and I would tell her because I wanted to know how they did it. She said, "well with artists and computers, of course", as if that were the extent of the effort involved. It was the need to know the secrets of the movie industry as a young child that really made the critic I am today.

I still own a functioning VHS player, for those few tapes which do not exist on DVD. To my absolute (and completely unexaggerated) horror, there has never been a UK DVD release, and the best I can get is a Region 1 import, or a Blu Ray, which I have no means of viewing. But the other day, a friend cleared out a bunch of her now grown-up kids' old videos for my daughter, and what the hell was among them? Yes, one of the top 10 movies of the '90s years of my childhood! (and that will surely become an article on here in due course!) So yesterday, my daughter and I sat down to watch it together. And I ended up noticing several things about it that I never saw as a child. Not bad things, necessarily, but some really leapt out at me.

For example, the movie is only an hour long. When you consider the then-advanced technology, big name stars and voice artists... it cost 27 million fucking dollars to make! And sure, three mere years after that smarmy git James Cameron broke new f/x barriers with the epic Terminator 2: Judgement Day, it's nothing terribly special. But it was a lot for its time, especially when you take into account the meagre box office performance of $13 million (yet, I suspect, the video - and video game - sales must have brought it closer to profit). So it's interesting that all of these resources would produce only an hour's worth of material.

Look at that little face!

But I primarily digress; let's get to the plot. Macaulay Culkin (who I only yesterday realised was a very cute kid) plays Richard Tyler, a bespectacled, paranoid little geek, who is obsessed with accidents, and the statistics that protect him from them. His bedroom is adorned with homemade 'No Smoking' and 'High Voltage' signs, earthquake survival kits and fire extinguishers... it's bordering on darkly humorous. But in reality, it's sad that a kid is already so haunted by fears that shouldn't have crept up on him for another ten years or so. So this is established as the situation that will be rectified by whatever adventure he happens upon. His poor parents desperately try to encourage their son to take the most banal of chances, like climbing the ladder of the treehouse his Pop (Ed Begley Jr.) is building him, and sending him to the hardware store for a pound of nails.

Suiting up in reflective jacket and motorcycle helmet like a knight going to battle, Richard mounts his trusty pimped-up Safety Cycle, complete with tall warning flags, windshield and double headlights, and heads out. Thing alert: when Pop sends Richard out to get the nails, it is a bright and sunny day, and when he actually heads out, it is almost dark outside, and storm clouds are brewing...how long did it take him to get kitted up? Anywho, Richard heads cautiously off, gets caught in a storm, and flees to the nearest building -- an ornate old library that looks more like one of the big museums in London. It is the library of dreams, with massive high ceilings and dark marble pillars and cases of leather and gold bound books reaching up out of view. Here he is met by eccentric-as-ever Christopher Lloyd as Mr Dewey, who has a "talent for guessing what people need", so perhaps could have done financially better in Deuce Bigalow's gig.

Whilst looking through the vast, maze-like bookcases for the public telephone, Richard comes across a wild mural on the dome of the ceiling, depicting several classic literary character, and the wizard-like, robed Pagemaster (Dewey's alter-ego). The kid slips on the wet floor and knocks himself unconscious, waking up to great globs and geisers of paint gushing down from the ceiling to form a giant CGI dragon, which consumes him and transforms him into an illustration in the book world. Here, he is instructed by the Pagemaster to pass three tests of Horror, Adventure and Fantasy, before he can find his way home, each of these genres materialising as anthropomorphic books, brilliantly voiced by Frank Welker, Patrick Stewart and Whoopi Goldberg respectively.

Whaddaya know?! I found a pic that demonstrates the terror!

From here to five minutes from the end, Richard and his friends run through incredibly short episodes with the classic literary characters, who are each depicted as very one-dimensional villains -- nothing more than a menacing obstacle to temporarily delay Richard's progress back home. However, they are all unusually dark. The entire picture is, more so in imagery than in theme. Colours are dark greys and greens, and there are a couple of images that still haunt me to this day. I actually regretted, at these points and others, showing it to my five year old. What a stupid bugger, I thought. The shot that takes the cake, is when Jekyll transforms into the hideous Hyde, coming straight up to the 'camera' with his hands concealing his face, and suddenly whipping his hands away, scr
eaming his name and giving the poor kids in the audience a full-screen close-up of his truly hideous face, and their parents a haemmorage-inducing earful of that shrill scream-pitch that only youngsters can reach. The close runner-up is during the friends' tackle with Captain Ahab in the middle of the ocean. Moby Dick, here depicted impossibly large and fierce in the eyes, charges their boat vertically, and shown from a bird's eye view, thundering imminently upwards towards them and chomping the boat to toothpicks.

The dark visuals and themes of the movie mentioned, another Thing pops up: the skies in the Pagemaster's world have an uncanny knack for turning dark green or red the instant the latest villain rolls up to be slain. And that's the other thing... these villains are in the habit of disappearing without actually being slain. Moby Dick savages the boat, and is never seen again. So what, did he just get bored and swim away? Surely he's still very much in the area. What does the evasive nature of these villains' pursuits teach Richard? Because this is, of course, the classic Wizard of Oz format, with a youngster with life lessons to learn being swept up in some fantastical journey away from their comfort zone and befriending three characters who will help them reach the correct realisations. Labyrinth adopted the same format, as have many, far less superior family pictures.

So what is Richard supposed to learn from this, quite frankly terrifying, ordeal? The animated portion of the movie's swift conclusion seems to summarise that he needed to learn to be brave. What did books, or reading, have to do with this lesson?... *cricket chirp*.... *tumble weed*...
And why exactly did he need to learn this? I suppose his neurosis wasn't completely healthy for a kid so young, but Roger Ebert rather correctly points out that the lesson here is that Richard needs to toughen up, take it like a man...he is basically trained to be a marine. And all with literature providing a false facade for the lesson. I almost scold myself for being so fucking cynical about a movie that brought so much excitement to my young life, but in a proper, grown-up review of a family film, the truth can hurt.

On the odd occasion, I have come across my hero Ebert dismally slating one of my favourite movies. The Lost Boys was a good example. The Pagemaster is another. One of the many phenomena to occur when you watch certain movies with frequency from childhood into adulthood, is that you come to realise that just because something has sentimental and nostalgic value, does not make it artistically rich or masterfully created; although The Lost Boys is very much both of these things, The Pagemaster is not. And it's often difficult when you hit the wall of maturity, when you see the product through adult eyes, which are lensed by knowledge of life and reality and common sense. One may be inclined to feel sadness, disappointment, emptiness as a result of this phenomena. Thankfully, I have learned to separate the quality from the nostalgic, and so, all these years later, can still enjoy The Pagemaster, and feel like I'm five again, whilst acknowledging with myself that it's not a well made movie.

Sleepaway Camp 2: Unhappy Campers (1988)

Sleepaway Camp is probably my favourite slasher discovery of this year. Campy, with a brilliant twist and material you quite frankly just couldn't and wouldn't make nowadays, it's the one out of every ten or twenty that you remember vividly, that you come back to watching again. It's a riot.

So it's only natural, in the big money-making machine that is often filmmaking, that someone would want to come along and mooch off of the original's success. In fact, it'd be fun to play a game where whoever thinks of the most horror movies without sequels would win a cookie. Along with action, it must be the most sequelled genre of all. But the difference with Sleepaway Camp 2 is that the usual 'big mystery' is already solved: we know Angela, the poor psychotic he-she from the original, is back with a vengeance, ready to slaughter slutty and insubordinate campers. Yes, as she reveals towards the end, thanks to a ton of good references from the doctors that treated her, she is cured and ready for gainful employment. Especially the kind that takes place in the exact same setting as her previous ordeal.

Angela is played quite nicely

Yeah...awful lot of this goin' on.

by Pamela Springsteen (yes, I found out, she is related to Bruce), and is the counsellor who surely has a problem with uppers, if her wide eyes and Osmondy grin are anything to go on. But while she is first to whip out a guitar for a round of Kumbaya, she is also the strict schoolmarmish one, who insists that "nice girls don't have to show it off." And who would she impart this wisdom to, if this camp (not Arrawak, but Rolling Hills) were not at least partially populated by teenage hoes who enjoy waltzing around naked? It seems Angela has found her calling.

Ultimately, there is nothing too remarkable about any of Sleepaway Camp 2. It is tamer in almost every aspect than the original: although there are a lot of young boobs, there's no full frontal that the original is so infamous for; the murders are far less graphic and imaginative; the bittersweet sleaziness that characters like Artie the paedo cook brought to the first is largely absent. And in absence of any tangible originality (especially in view of no less than six Friday the 13th movies preceding this picture), a lot of ideas are borrowed from elsewhere, with particularly glaring reference to the legendary Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

As Angela slowly but surely builds a scene straight off of the Sawyers' family Christmas card out of dead campers, each murder under the guise of sending the kid home for bad behaviour, the staff start to suspect something is going on. But not in time. They just become tally marks for Angela's body count, which seems to be the main driving force of the plot. In a story with this many minor characters, it is surprising to see a conclusions that leaves every single one dead, campers and counsellors alike.

What's more surprising is how little is made out of such brilliant source material. I kept trying to remind myself throughout viewing that this was a professional production. It's just that acting is largely dreadful (with the conclusive survivor-on-aggressor scuffle shockingly choreographed and edited), camera work is slow and unadventurous, little decent use is made of soundtrack, and the script is poor (not even in the 'so bad it's good' kind of way). In fairness, it is a decent enough movie for one of those fun film nights with friends where you laugh and drink and eat pizza and stuff. It's a laugh... but it's by no means a great horror.



Although it may sound like a typical alternative, I still feel that some kind of corny reunion special back at Camp Arrawak with the counsellors and/or campers who we can assume survived the first movie. Because that would have more meaning to it than this movie does, which seems to exist as nothing more than an under-the-radar slashfest with little further context. Sleepaway Camp left us asking questions, wondering about motives and morals, about pasts and futures. Sleepaway Camp 2 leaves us wondering, and then suddenly not wondering, why Felissa Rose didn't reprise her classic role.

As Above, So Below (2014)

A fortnight ago, I was several hundred feet under the streets of Paris, wandering through endless tunnels walled with human bones, holding my video camera in one hand, and finding myself surprisingly regardless of the camera screen. I was focused on the real, what was going on around me in the place that I was at this very time. The footage was incidental; it could be looked at when I got home. For now, I was going to really have fun and learn a lot exploring the Catacombs. Having been alerted to the release of As Above, So Below from its exciting enough but rather usual marketing campaign last year, but not having seen it yet, I thought a lot about the idea of a handheld picture being made down there.

The Paris Catacombs only allow 200 people down at any one time, hence the often lengthy queue. The strange thing was, the place was so vast that we only saw perhaps six or eight other people the entire time we were down there. The majority of the time, we were alone. That sheds a little light on how huge the tunnels are, and that's the guided route. Visitors will observe alternative routes leading off of tunnels, the tourist route marked out by gates. Some of these alternative tunnels ride off into complete darkness. If people arrogant and intrusive enough to be found in a movie like this were to cut the locks and skulk off, it could most definitely end pretty disastrously.

What would make a movie like that even better, I decided, was my realisation that I paid no attention to what my camera was capturing, but what was in front of me. This offered massive potential for forces/creatures unseen to the characters but acknowledged by the audience. This could be really chilling. It was obvious: the Catacombs made for a brilliant horror film setting.

In fairness, As Above, So Below ended up going in a somewhat unexpected direction towards its conclusion, and although a bit messily constructed, it is a highly researched film. Respect must be paid for effort made. There is a lot of mythical and legendary namedropping, such as the philosopher's stone and Nicolas Flamel, and a lot of that irritatingly vague cryptography that the characters must battle their baffled little selves through. There is also a lot of jaw-dropping stupidity from one solitary character.

Leading lady Scarlett (Perdita Weeks) is a middle-class parent's wet dream. She looks no older than 25, yet she holds two PhDs, a Masters degree, and speaks six languages fluently (two of those being dead), and to top it all off, she is a university professor! She is everything I aspired to be at the naive age of 13. She is like Lara Croft. Because not only is she a painfully qualified academic, she is also a badass (which in this instance is synonymous with moron). She doesn't have the sexual prowess and ridiculously tightly clad bod, but she unlawfully trespasses on an Iranian cave system that is minutes from being demolished by dynamite, knowing the legal ramifications, and presumably, just how mindblowingly stupid and death-welcoming the decision is. All the warning alarms are blaring, and she finds the Rose Key, a large relic that her scholarly father sought his whole life. Lo and behold, explosives start going off all around her, and there is a frantic, and admittedly tense, run-for-life back to the exit, via helmetcam.

This is the format for most of the movie, plonking it in the increasingly cloudy subgenre I know and love...the Found Footage. The more people make this kind of fad movie, the more audiences ask, 'Who finds the footage?' The early and more classic examples of FF offered explanations as to the recovery of the materials, but of late, the genre is straying from being 'found', and settling as 'homemade'. There no longer has to be a barely-believable reason that this footage, exactly as it is presented to us, was recovered from some unsurvived crime scene or tragedy. It is now more of a medium, just a different narrative perspective, which continues to be exercised to varying levels of success. The premise for filming the incidents we witness are ever up for question: it helps if one or more persons has some kind of professional business in filmmaking or television; those assholes who just inexplicably film every mundane thing that he and his asshole friends do, with seemingly limitless battery power, are far less likely to keep our attention.

Scarlett is the subject of a documentary being filmed by Benji (Edwin Hodge) about her uptake of the search for the philosopher's stone, which drove her father to self-destructive madness. She seems minimally deterred by the stone's blatantly negative psychic affects, or by anything else for that matter. She breaks into demolition sites, churches, large underground tombs, and when her old flame George (Ben Feldman) is reluctantly recruited on her latest mission into the Catacombs, where she is convinced the stone is hidden, we find out that her shenanigans formerly resulted in the couple's incarceration in a Turkish prison. She is irritatingly relentless in her carelessness, which she masquerades as determination and adventurousness.

George speaks Arabic, which is why he is recruited for the various translations needed on the quest, and his skills are centre stage as he gives the English form of an Arabic riddle. And whaddaya know?! It still has perfect rhythm and rhyme, as though it were originally written in English, although this is surely impossible. Then, in a Paris nightclub, Scarlett ropes a semi-suave looking dude named Papion (not sure where the 'butterfly' symbolism occurs in any part of the film -- his parents must have seen in him some gentility which we do not). He is en garde, and swaggery, and he can show the group a non-official route to the treasure. And old Pap is a package deal: he brings relatively professional cronies along, who are experienced climbers, potholers, etc. Seems like a fairly safe setup for what is inevitably doomed to at least partial failure. Scarlett will still have her documentary regardless, we can concede early on.

It follows a fairly standard pattern at first: caves collapse, no way but forward, group leader arrogantly insists they take the tunnel of doom rather than the legit ones, a whole bunch of rather juvenile-feeling clue-busting, which Scarlett continuously solves quickly and inexplicably. It's always one of those things that could refer to fucking anything, and that only Jonathan Creek could solve, and only after several days of non-active conversations and thoughtful stares in a duffle coat. But then, a few peer-deaths down the line, things start getting... I dunno...not theological, not existential, perhaps a little spiritual. In another problem-solving scenario, and probably the most risky one yet, Scarlett concedes that the reason the world is going crazy and rooms are shifting and weird cloaked figures are stalking them, is that each of the survivors has some guilt, some personal demon which haunts them, that they must release before they are to get out. With a little Inferno referencing and a generally Abrahamic Damnation style, things steer away from the lower-market FF movies with many quick flashes of ghostly faces, and go in a far more big-budget direction with its ideology, leaning more toward the likes of Insidious and The Possession.

The plot and setting seemed relatively original for a movie of its kind, but it constantly felt like something was missing. We had the slow and subtle build-up, with plenty of calmness and establishment of plan and walking and talking, and the first few 'encounters' are typically ambiguous in nature, warranting the characters to shrug them off or not recognise them at all until shit really starts going down. And for the first hour or so, I believed that some kind of dramatic peak was imminent, but this movie left me totally blue-balled. All great (or good...or even just mediocre) horror movies must have at least one moment of forceful impact, the Oh Shit moment, in which everything that you have watched so far comes to fruition, and you feel thrilled. You need the moment in which everyday existence is turned upside down, and the hapless characters find themselves within a scenario that they never imagined they'd experience. We need the world to fall away.

And the crazy thing is that in this movie, it quite literally does, yet it is never enough. It's like 100 minutes of digital foreplay followed by the light going out...and not even a cigarette to conclude. It's all good stuff, but it didn't have any real climax. And moreover, the ending leaves everything unnervingly unanswered. From the course of action they've given us, we all make assumptions about the condition of the world the few survivors escape to. It's no real conclusion. But the movie is far less shaky and so more watchable than a lot of its kind, and gets some interesting shots, and some pretty great atmosphere from its sets.

I feel like I want to give As Above, So Below more credit than it truly deserves: the use of the Parisian catacombs is brilliant, themes are interesting and performances and camera work is somewhat above average. But the scary bits are far too diluted, and most of them turn out to have been contained in the trailer, which is one of my pet peeves. It seems unfulfilled, and that's how it left me feeling. Not all that I had expected. It's worth seeing, and it's fun enough, but if you're looking for a Found Footage movie that packs a punch, go for the Blair Witch Project, or even low-enders like Crowsnest and Grave Encounters 2. If you're strong of stomach, go straight to Cannibal Holocaust.

Cabin Fever: Patient Zero (2014)

 What is Sean Astin - former Goonie who pulled off the most convincing regional English accent perhaps ever performed by an American in Lord of the Rings - doing starring in the under-the-radar third installment of the Cabin Fever series? Perhaps the answer is: bringing a shred of respectability to the movie. The answer is most certainly: absolutely going to town on it! My very initial reaction to his involvement was pity - the poor thing's prospects must have dried up pretty sharpish since LOTR, as often happens in Hollywood. And that would have been a shame, as there is no doubt Astin is a very good actor. But quite honestly, after a mere minute of watching him perform in this picture, sympathy melted into admiration.

Astin stars as the titular Patient Zero, a.k.a Porter: a medical lifeline whose natural immunity to the virus he carries is of great interest to a sinister team of scientists. He wakes to the chilling news that his child has been claimed by the flesh-eating virus sweeping--- well, sweeping some area or other. It's sweeping enough to have killed off all that Porter knows, but contained enough for a runaway labmouse to cause unwitting terror to a yacht-driving stag party.

Now it is not an uncommon premise for a character to be held against their will with the knowledge that their former lives and companions are gone forever, but it's far less common to see such a role performed with a tangible nihilism. From his first delirious jabberings about having to buy school supplies for his little boy to his final questionable actions of the finale, Astin encapsulates a wretched man with about as many reasons to carry on living as methods of doing himself in.

Right?! Classic laboratory get-up!

Thankfully, for supposed PhD-holding medical research professionals, Porter's captors are remarkably stupid. Not only do the females wear full make-up, stiletto heels and blouses unbuttoned to their breastbones in a sterile lab environment, and drop infected labmice without even attempting to recapture them; they also reply "with my life" when their sleazy superior orders them into the cleanroom to restrain contaminated patients while he hogs the only bunnysuit and menacingly asks, "Do you trust me?" Needless to say, this particular scenario holds some rather disastrous and contagious consequences which were a probable joy for the F/X guys.

Now while all this is a fairly decent plotline, particularly given Astin's performance, one may actually wonder what the movie would have been like if solely focused on Patient Zero. As it happens, a full-length sci-fi feature seems beyond the makers. After all, fake blood and brains is easier to produce than meaningful scientific dialogue and plot. All good Cabin Fevers must have young and relatively attractive idiots to consume from the outside in: first it was college students vacationing in the woods; then it was high school students getting eaten up at a remarkable rate whilst attending Spring Fling. This time we have a stag party, containing groom Marcus (Mitch Ryan), who of course is being forced to grow up by his straitlaced wife, much to the despair of his Stifler-like friend Dobbs (Ryan Donowho) and brother Josh (Brando Eaton), whose girlfriend Penny (Jillian Murray) once fucked Marcus but that's their annoying secret which warrants her casually whipping her top off in front of him. We already have her down as 'the dead slut'.

They have done one of those The Beach things of paying a local fisherman to take them out to a supposedly deserted island. When the group question the huge institution looming on one side, the fisherman assures them "nobody home." They settle into their tropical paradise with tents, beers, snorkels and a bag of the local good stuff that looks more like ground-up tea leaves than any ganja. The couple go swimming and find a piscine graveyard. The girl flips out about it, and storms off to the tent where she soon notices weird grazes which quickly turn into gross lesions. Her helpful boyfriend first produces a whopping black dildo (complete with suction cup) which some weirdo brought along, and then reassures her that the skin condition is just a reaction to the local grass they smoked (ambitious idea). Then they treat us to a hardcore homage to the first Cabin Fever movie...

Remember when Karen and Paul are getting intimate and his bloodied fingers set the whole gruesome ball rolling? Well didn't you always want to see a guy's head emerge from between his girlfriend's thighs  to be sporting a bloodbeard with rotten bits of labia dripping from it? Didn't we all? And we anticipate it horrendously when Penny shoves Josh's face into her crotch with a squelch. It's a bit of a money shot in terms of shock and gross-out value, and it works hilariously well, producing a simultaneous gag and giggle.

Well, with Soon-to-be-Dead Slut's pussy dropping off like Danniella Westbrook's septum, the fellas decide that perhaps they need to seek medical attention, especially as the grazes are now starting to show on Josh. The girl waits at the tent patiently and quite calmly for someone whose sex organs are disintegrating. Exploring the bowels of the huge building on the other side of the island -- which in places is a fully functioning structure, and in others, nothing more than a cave complex -- the guys come across the remaining idiot scientists, who are pissed to be dealing with the escape of their prized subject. The cleavage-exposing blonde who dropped the mouse and said "with my life" tries to con the guys into assisting her, covering her deformities with a face mask (yes, the face is gone, but that rack is still perfect -- praise the Lord!).

Her boring colleague Camila (Solly Duran) warns the guys that the blonde is contagious and hasn't taken kindly to her newfound state, so shouldn't be trusted. Camila is perhaps the one true drawback of the film. Although I see that Solly Duran currently has 10 acting credits to her name, it feels as though she couldn't deliver a natural line of dialogue if you held a gun to her head, let alone paid her a moderate low-budget production wage to do it. Her presence is grating, her every word mechanical and painfully unconvincing. Typically, she is the irritating bitch we are stuck with til the end, as the female half as the Remaining Couple.

Which means, naturally, that the other dicks have to die. Only the two-in-one is memorable. The diseased scientist with the still-perfect titties is well and truly on the rampage, and escapes the clutches of the group, fleeing to the beach. Except by this point, Penny has grown tired of being left behind with decomposing genitals, and so goes on a little rampage of her own. Ding-ding-ding -- CAT FIGHT! Scratch that -- CAT FIGHT OF THE CENTURY! You know how brown paper bags go when you get caught in the rain...gradually drooping off in great piles of beige slop? As two girls, both in the later phases of a deadly flesh-eating viral condition, set about each other in a ferocious wrestle, bits and bobs start sludging off all over the place, and it's a fight to the death, until there's nothing left but a rapast fit for a vulture king. Awesome.

Cabin Fever: Patient Zero is apparently a prequel to the whole series, and is a semi-interesting way for the thing to go. Just like the laughable Hostel Part III, this movie is also, to quote my earlier review, "emaciated from Roth deficiency". There is little trace of the creator's original zest, and what we're left with in terms of memorability, is a show-stealing performance by one actor who deserves much better, and a beach that looks like a butcher shop fell of the back of a truck. Not bad, but not necessary either.

Spring Breakers (2012)

Advertising is a cynical business, isn't it? Whether they're using specific words like "appears" to protect themselves against lawsuits, or downright lying about there being "liquid calcium" in toothpaste, nothing is ever as it seems. Several times over the past few years, I have been completely rocked back on my heels by a movie whose trailer painted it in a completely different light. Summer in February and My Old Lady are a few devious examples. Spring Breakers is another...

When all the movie and its promo stills are so electrically coloured with neon blues and pinks and yellows, and feature the grinning faces upon the bikinied bodies of several young beauties, Disney girls Vanessa Hudgens and Selena Gomez among them, we are set up for an American Pie-like scenario, where hot college girls have a few weeks of crazy, loud, booze-fuelled fun that's likely to end up on YouTube. Even with the knowledge that the girls hold up a restaurant to fund their trip, I figured that this would be played out comically, and that nothing would require being taken too seriously.

But several things really disturbed me about Spring Breakers, the first starting very early on in the picture, and others taking a little longer to show themselves. The girls are Candy (Hudgens), Cotty (Rachel Korine) and Brit (Ashley Benson), who are trouble-seeking party girls and for some reason hang out with church-going resident-downer Faith (Gomez). They decide to bugger off for spring break, as sexy American teens with inexplicably infinite cash sources tend to do. But these girls are broke, so plot to rob a diner, do it, and run off to the beach for a fortnight of fun. The kind of fun they end up having, whether it is really fun or not, and what kind of fun the audience are supposed to be having are all up for question. In particular our part as the audience.

Only a few minutes into the movie, all four girls are fooling around in a darkened corridor, only wearing their underwear. They do handstands against the walls, and eventually fall about on the floor, wiggling their asses in the air as the camera grooms them like an overly-forceful cat lady. I felt uncomfortably voyeuristic watching this, not even voyeuristic, more predatory. Because never in a thousand years would a stranger pass by, happen to peek into the window of this corridor, and have a scene like this playing out by coincidence. The girls aren't doing all this gyrating for their own amusement -- they're doing it for the audience, and it's contrived as hell. The weirdest thing is, as a female of about the same age as the actresses and the girls they are portraying, I still felt wrong watching them. There was just something so obviously wrong with the scene. And from there, it continued down the route of 'Male Fantasy'.

Spring break is fun, and they drink, and snort coke off of other girls' boobs, and get off with slobs. Brit finds herself in a really gross situation, in which she is high as hell, in a bathroom full of guys, sluggishly ripping her bra off and teasing that "you'll never get this pussy." Then the action cuts back to what the other girls are doing. I rather feel that it's because if it'd hung around any longer, it may have subjected us to a gang rape scene. It was upsetting to watch a girl degrade herself in such a dangerous way, especially knowing that this sort of behaviour is really quite commonplace among my generation. I get that this is an adult film, with an 18 certificate, and that there are many movies I have praised that have contained similar incidents, but it's just not what I was up for. It felt cheap and fantasised.

Just when I was starting to wonder how teens managed to rip buildings apart, cause more mayhem than Martin and Charlie Sheen at a father-son picnic, and ingest a steady current of substances without attracting outside attention, the girls are arrested, and stand in a courtroom in their bikinis (honestly, I don't think any of them wear anything more than that at any point). There, they are eyed-up and eventually bailed out by the slimiest geezer I've come across in film since the Duke in Moulin Rouge. In place of a nasally sneer from behind a perfectly waxed moustache, we have cornrows and gang tattoos on a white guy played by James Franco. This dude has named himself Alien, as a result of a lifetime of egotistical self-philosophy that Kanye West holds the record for.

The girls go back to his skeevy place and repay him for his kind bailing. And yep, it is exactly as creepy as it sounds. Only Faith has a problem with weirdo crackheads drooling over her shoulder and groping her. The other girls, in a completely whacked state of mind, it would seem, totally get off on the underground superstar lifestyle that Alien leads, which involves being constantly surrounded by pale, skinheaded gangsters, swaggering around with guns wearing only underwear (which naturally works for the girls) and having sex. Faith is the first of the girls to realise that something seriously dreadful is going to come of this situation, and hops on the next bus home, never to be heard of again. Weird.

The rest of the movie documents the remaining girls' moral and personal deterioration as Bikini Bitches of a questionably-successful white gangster. Lots more sex, drugs and abuse. They get dragged into a violent rivalry with another, far less white, gangster. It is an unsettling, dark underworld story, with not a speck of the comparative joy that the earlier days of their trip involved. Franco, punctuating his frequent stoner collaborations with Seth Rogen, reminds us of his often dormant ability, creating a sinister facade that deemed him unrecognisable to me for several minutes. His cited inspiration from rapper Riff Raff helped him to become a silly wannabe hardman who never matured past the age of sixteen, but whose subsequent years have instilled in him a dark idiocy, and a masked neediness.

The entirety of Spring Breakers plays out in an almost pornographic way; not in the sense that anything explicitly and unsimulatedly sexual is shown, but in the sense that its whole being is played strictly to a male fantasy. Young, slim girls in bikinis, complete exhibitionists, who are putting on a constant stripper act for their unacknowledged audience. It plays out with intention to titillate -- the main factor that can see art house movies such as 9 Songs and Antichrist separated from mainstream pornography. Not only does it titillate the audience with gratuitous young flesh, it also teases its less mature viewers with the idea of the lifestyles of drug-ring prostitutes being the dream life. Eighteen year olds are still perfectly corruptible with stupid ideas, and so I really would question what creator Harmony Korine (surprisingly, not a female) meant by this movie. It doesn't really present any good ideas, but doesn't present itself as a cautionary tale either. The girls who do decide to get out are completely forgotten once they're gone. Faith, and later Cotty, are never seen again, and this seems indicative of the entire attitude of the film. In this sort of crazy lifestyle, not a thing matters.

Don't Go In The House (1979)

I decided to start from the beginning with the Don't... movies. They are a famous figure in the exploitation genre, and if the first installment is anything to go by, the titles offer rather irrelevant advice to potential victims. And for once, we find ourselves concurring with the taglines...'don't say we didn't warn you...' I mean, for God's sake, people: the title told you not to, and yet on you waltz into the house! Don't you know you're in the middle of a slasher movie?! Imaginative viewers have paid far more attention to the assertion of the movie's title than its characters do, and have suggested alternatives. A few of my own might include Don't Hitch Rides With Weirdos, Don't Snoop Around Weirdos' Houses and Don't Piss Off Child Abuse Victims. Any one of these could have served more suitably as the 'warning' of the story. 'Don't Go In The House!'? But all my stuff is in there!

Donny Kohler (Dan Grimaldi) is a quiet, weird guy who looks like a less-striking David Hess and works at an incinerator plant. He is obsessed with fire, thanks to his abusive mother's fanatical religiously-based abuse of him during which she'd 'burn the evil out' of him. So, you may say, 'Good on ya, Donny -- ya landed ya dream job!' But with fire being top of his Christmas list, he is less than responsive in fire-related health and safety situations. The opening scene sees one of Donny's colleagues fishing around an incinerator for an aerosol can. Now, I'm no Incineratory Technician, but I know that where there's a furnace and there's a metallic container of compressed gas, I'm not gonna be around to see out the consequences. So, the can goes boom and all the other guys scramble to put out their professional friend who doesn't seem to know the words Stop, Drop and Roll, while Donny stares on hazily.

The guys get mad at little ol' Donny for being fucking useless in a crisis situation, and he runs off home. The first second you get a glimpse of the Kohler place, you practically see 'Bates' written all over it. The obvious inspiration for this crooked mansion atop a hill sets the ball rolling for several other allusions to predecessors of the horror genre. Now if you thought Donny was having a bad day, you should see the look on his face when he finds his mother at home dead. How awful! But, oh wait, Donny's mother was a maniacal child-abuser. After an initial burst of rage at the cold and pale (yet still visibly breathing) mother, he recognises his newfound freedom, and so decides to live the good life: he turns up his records and swings back on the chair. He even smokes a cigarette!

But now for the real fun... to pretend his mother is still alive, not show up for work for a week, and lure gorgeous ladies back to his house for a little hot stuff. First up is a snotty florist (Johanna Brushay), whom Donny offers a ride home. Then he pulls that classic "I just gotta swing by my place for a minute -- it's right on the way" thing. Donny is no slobbering hick with an eyepatch; in fact he looks deceptively friendly, so when he is the only person around to give a lift, politeness indicates that there is little room for hesitation on this request. But then when they get there, Donny insists she come in and meet Mother Kohler. The girl seems to be with us in imagining that any guy who brings a random stranger in to meet his mother probably has some kind of issue, but it would just be plain rude to refuse, right?

The exteriors of the house are completely Hitchcockean, and the interiors have a real Carrie feel to them, with the long cavernous stairwells and gloomy woodwork. It is, as a drunken victim later comments, in dire need of a paint job. One room in particular is quite the spectacle. Once the girl is knocked out (as was imminent -- these buggers are never man enough to just drag a conscious person off against their will, are they?), she wakes up naked, chained to the floor by her feet and her hands to the ceiling of a steel-lined room, and Donny comes storming in menacingly in his full work uniform. Sure hope he noted the extra hours he put in at home down on his time sheet.

The death of Donny's first victim is apparently what most of the fuss was about, and what landed the movie in hot water with the Daily Mail's dumbass scaremongering campaign. The poor girl is doused in petrol and set ablaze with a flamethrower. My initial thought whilst watching this sequence was that its state-of-the-art CGI (Highlander style) were far more than I ever expected from a picture like Don't Go In The House. And I suppose it is quite horrific. But then, I'd recall the death of Delecroix in The Green Mile as far more painful to watch in comparison. I would say the more disturbing aspect of the scene is the mechanical, laborious manner in which Donny carries it out. Albeit a little batty, so far he has come across as a relatively meek fellow, but the way he torches the girl like he does every day at work...it feels as meaningless as a porn actor having sex with his wife at night.

Donny starts hearing voices. Encouraging him to burn the evil out of others. Seems like the Old Lady is getting bored and jealous out there on th'other side. He collects a couple more victims, and chars his mother's body, and arranges them in a macabre Texas Chainsaw Massacre-style family. Now a colleague, Bobby (Robert Osth), calls to see what has kept Donny from work for a week. He invites him out with suggested hooker arrangements made. Hesitant at first, Donny agrees, and hits the clothing store to purchase some disco-worthy gladrags. There he is served by a hilarious camp salesman, who kits him up in a surprisingly plain suit, so when he rolls up to the disco he feels kind of uncomfortable.

Well, it's uncertain whether the promise of whores is really fulfilled. It seems more like Bobby has met two young women who agreed to go out for the night, and he... filled in the gaps, so to speak. They seem nice. Not really whore material. Everyone is eager to dance except our valiant hero, and the poor girl who gets foisted upon him makes the mistake of being a bit too insistent with a secret psycho. Hey -- easy thing to do. As he is sat at a candlelit table, the girl grabs his hands and tries to pull him towards the dancefloor, rather carelessly holding his bare arms over the flame. *Momma Flashback* Cue the publicly alarming episodes which finally draw outside attention to Donny's shenanigans. He freaks out and throws the flame in the girl's face, setting her hair alight and promptly legging it.

During his workless week, Donny anxiously consulted with Father Gerrity (Ralph D. Bowman), telling him of the abuse he suffered at the hands of his mother, and of his murderous tendencies as a result. Gerrity advises that Donny forget it all and move on, that what's in the past can't hurt him. So Donny tried this, but as the little incident in the nightclub demonstrates, it's not had the greatest success rate. So along with the alarmed Bobby, who is left to deal with two girls whose night has been little of what was promised, Donny also has Gerrity looking for him.

He has meanwhile picked up a couple of drunk chicks looking for a ride to the nearest available booze-jockey. Having developed something of a flair for bringing chicks home, he offers them a much better night at his house. They're drunk, and dumb (deadly combo) so gladly accept and start obnoxiously snooping around once they get to the Kohler place, as dumbass victims often do. To be honest, if I invited a new 'friend' to my house, went to get drinks, and came back to find them snooping through my bedroom, I'd be pretty pissed too.

The Priest-Whoremonger duo descend upon Donny's house, freeing the drunk girls from their topless captivity, and taking on the Fire Demon. Donny suits up, and tries to barbecue Gerrity, who is rescued by Bobby, prompting the psycho to barricade himself in his creepy Family Den. Now here's the cool ending I didn't see coming... the Mother-shaped jerky and her poor companions start to creak to life and edge menacingly towards him. I wonder if perhaps the ending sequence of Tony Scott's wicked The Hunger was inspired by this far less stylish example. But dontcha love it when the Insanity card is played throughout, only for the Supernatural card to be suddenly whipped out like a Thai bride's cock at last minute?! What a riot!

I mean, that's assuming that this isn't just another manifestation of Donny's increasingly menacing psyche. If nothing else, Don't Go In The House lends an ear to the lonely, abused souls who suffer pain and degradation. Donny's seeking of redemption in the form of Gerrity demonstrates his ultimately good nature, and he is clearly a tortured man. But what could be learnt from the movie? I suppose, the only lesson the duration of this pretty decent horror teaches can be best summed up by its title, or better by some of my own suggestions. The aim of Don't Go In The House is to warn audiences Don't Piss Off Child Abuse Victims. 

Crossroads (2002)

Uh...this is legal, right?

Road trip movies may be the most misleading subgenre ever...well, perhaps those and rom-coms. But for every road trip movie I watch, and for every standard requirement box each one ticks off, I find myself asking the same questions, as if what I were watching bore any resemblance to reality. I have come to the educated conclusion that the USA as a whole has no regulations against driving someone else's vehicle uninsured or carrying passengers on the trunk of a convertible. If it weren't for regular doses of Judge Judy, movies like this would convince me entirely that the Great Nation are inexplicably lenient with their legal system.

As a child of the '90s, I was supposedly the exact target audience for Britney's movie Crossroads when it was released in 2002. I was ten. I remember seeing it in the cinema with my dad and younger sister, who would have been eight. We were both massive Britney fans (gimme a break, it was a different time!) and if anyone can be sold an inane package with a famous character's face on it, it's eight- to ten-year-olds. I loved the movie as a child, and don't remember even wondering about the meaning of the surprisingly adult content within. I wasn't particularly alarmed by a pregnant eighteen year old, but the concepts of drink, rape, abandonment, miscarriage and the loss of one's virginity were lost upon my infant mind. Watching it in my 20s, I was sort of surprised at the age range this movie really was aimed at. It's sort of like the Parental Advisory announcement before the Jerry Springer show. Kids could watch it, but is it really a good idea?

Britney Spears plays Lucy, a cute (duh!), hard-working student who's ready to go off to med school and become a doctor, much to the delight of her equally hard-working but slightly abrasive dad Pete (Dan Ackroyd). The use of Ackroyd is a diluted form of his work as Harry Sultenfuss in the My Girl movies, where he had very well-written scripts and a character with more involvement than the statutory duties of the stern but loving father. He's still endearing, but Pete's opinions and actions merely serve the plot; there is no substance to them.


Years ago, Lucy buried a time capsule box with her two friends Mimi and Kitt, promising that they'd be friends forever (oh boy, we all know where this one's going). But on the day of their high school graduation, Mimi (Taryn Manning) is a pregnant trailer chick with dozens of gold hoop earrings and a scowl on her face, and Kitt (Zoe Saldana) is the stuck-up rich girl who has a fiancé over in LA. God knows how long it's been since they all hung out, but as often happens during adolescence, they drifted apart. They all reluctantly return to dig up the box on prom night, and an unconvincing, contrived form of a rediscovered relationship appears.

Mimi is off to audition for a recording contract in LA, hitching a ride with her shady friend Ben (Anson Mount), and invites the others to come along, for whatever reason. The trip is of the strictly-professional type at first: Mimi is auditioning, Kitt is making a surprise drop-in on her fiancé, and Lucy is getting off in Arizona for a surprise drop-in on her long-lost mother. Mimi is streetsmart, hence, the only one who doesn't think that surprise drop-ins on very absent figures is a good move, but who is she to convince her peers? They have their own inevitable fuck ups to serve that purpose.

The movie goes through the classic relationship motions of former friends/lovers/family brought together: initial wonder at the spectacle of being reunited, sudden realisation of why they are no longer friends, the primary threads of repair to the relationship, and ultimately the 'stronger than ever' crap. As with so many formulaic movies, we know what will happen in the end, and can make some pretty decent guesses about the middle. But that leaves us only to wonder about what they will do on the road. Will they have any deeply moving or thought-provoking conversations which really reveal their characters? Only at a 101 level. Will they pick up an interesting stranger who goes on to make or break them? No. Will at least one of them take up a questionable romantic attachment to the only male cast member who isn't the father? Of course, but it has to be the cute, exploitable one. (We're ready for you, Miss Spears!)

Rumour has it that Ben is fresh out of prison for murder (given his youthful appearance, we'd have to guess he was one of those Michael Myers child-convict types to have gotten out by now), and even sensible, would-be doctor Lucy is remarkably undeterred. She gets pissed and calls her father when their car breaks down, but when it is revealed the man driving them is a potential murderer, she just gives him the silent treatment. Of course, rumours are never true, and the reason for Ben's incarceration is very unexciting, giving him free reign to wiggle in as the cute virgin's First. And boy, is he willing. Throughout, he insists that nobody else drive his classic Buick convertible (fair enough), but as soon as the pussy's on the pedestal, he throws the keys to a couple of over-excited eighteen-year-olds in order to get rid of them. This guy's got his priorities in gear!

Is this really a screenshot from a kids' movie?

The more mature themes of the movie are questionable for me. I suppose given the embarrassing, manufactured 'icons' of today like Katy Perry and Taylor Swift and the age ranges they cater to, it's a tough one. No young adult trying to mold a career wants to pander to small children; they want some level of maturity and seriousness to their act. Spears repeatedly prances around in her underwear, the treatment of College Virgins is called up for discussion, the girls drink underage, and learn that performing an abysmally weak cover of a classic rock track and grinding on a pole will leave local hicks clambering to drop dollar bills in the hat. To be honest, the material is diluted, and if it could have broken out into a more adolescent picture worthy of a 15 rating, it could perhaps have performed to its full potential.

This is not to say that the movie would ever have been a masterpiece, but there is a feeling of family-oriented restraint to the whole thing. If a couple of swear words could have been thrown in, and if the scriptwriters could have fully developed the plotlines of rape, pregnancy etc. to adequately demonstrate the consequences, it could have been something. There is an inherent nonchalance to every issue. Mimi may have been raped, but it happens all the time. She may be a pregnant teenager, but she loses the baby, so there's no need to deal with the reality of teenage parenthood. And the ultimate message is definitely questionable: Lucy has worked very hard throughout her school years to build a strong career for herself and move her family up the social ladder. But what is academia worth when you can be a popstar? Encouraging children to abandon serious achievable ambitions in favour of the oldest honeytrap in existence is not the thing to do. And when you look at the fame-hungry Western societies that we live in today, it's hard to feel unconvinced that these sorts of influences over our generation have tainted our views of life, the world, and our self-worth.


The poorly-written caricature for Dan Ackroyd to play sort of seals Lucy's fate as a girl who once had huge potential but will almost certainly end up like the real Britney - used up, spat out and irreparably damaged by the whole experience, with little hope for any longevity. While Pete is required to scorn Lucy about the money he has lost, the professional relationships with her future employers she has destroyed and the general emotional distress her shenanigans have put him through, all she has to do is flutter her eyes and breathily whisper "I'm sorry" and it's all forgotten. What sort of ideas does this give to Lucy, and by extension, to the children who witness her story? These are serious issues in a real-life situation, but hey, money grows on trees and there'll always be some sucker to bail you out.

When dissected, many of Crossroads' elements are detrimental and amateur. Not to say there are no saving graces: Ackroyd is as wonderful as he can be, Taryn Manning is utterly convincing as a tough-skinned trailer park girl, and Zoe Saldana is quite possibly the highlight, with her sterling comic timing and delivery. She really made me laugh. It's deserving that of the trio, she went on to the biggest and best things. And if I'm really honest, Britney takes the few lines that really require any acting and gives them her all. She is no actress, but she's not as bad as people like to make out, and had the role been given to any other young blonde, it probably would have turned out no better. It's not a demanding role in the slightest, so it fits her quite well.

In terms of the Britney machine, the film played an interesting role. Made in 2001, when her image was still squeaky clean, before the likes of Toxic and its transparent bodysuits launched Britney's Madonna-brand sex appeal, it is amusing to see her dressed in frilly pink cardigans that go up to her neck, and insisting, "I have seen one, y'all!" (They're referring to the male sex organ, incidentally). Most of all, it's nice to see her the way she was. My God, she was a pretty girl. She just exuded vitality and bubbliness, and it makes the process of her mid-noughties downfall all the more painful to remember. The industry really did break this girl, and it's nice to see that nowadays her much-improved family life and Vegas residency have given her the happy medium that she could have done with years ago.

People have questioned for years why Crossroads has such a cult following, despite being publicly hated by anyone with the opportunity to voice it. Is it pure nostalgia, for all of us who want to remember a time when our biggest problems were deciding which pair of glitter jeans to wear to the school dance, or which member of Boyzone we wanted to marry? Is it that on the surface, Crossroads is a good-natured, sunny movie which is catchily optimistic? A film for children, I honestly think it is not. It never scarred me or turned me into an inconsiderate, denim skirt-wearing, man-punching potato-chip muncher, but I'm not sure I'd be in a hurry to show it to my daughter at any age prior to, perhaps, eleven or twelve. The transition into high school around this age inevitably catapults kids into a world full of nasties, like rape and teenage pregnancy, as well as a couple of secret joys, like sex and drugs. Kids of this age could really appreciate the movie for what it is, I believe. As long as their parents are still telling them to go be a doctor by the end of it.

Sleepaway Camp (1983)

I think maybe I haven't been indulging in enough '80s movies recently. For too long have I been wallowing in the shaggy beards and flared jeans of my beloved '70s...I'd totally forgotten that there were some serious short-short-wearing gentlemen who needed appreciating ten years later. Sleepaway Camp is gloriously kitsch, with its high tolerance for guys with crop tops and hotpants and girls with...well, more on that later...

The film starts on an interesting note: a dad and his son and daughter are out on a boating trip, and fall into the water. This isn't really the issue. Issue is, there's a teenage lifeguard in a motorboat nearby who's being hassled by some girl (who rocks a fat fold on her stomach -- thanks for the achievable body image, '80s!) to let her take a turn at the wheel. The darn fool concedes and she manages to cause a major freakin' wipeout, killing the dad and one of the children. As if this isn't bad enough, the motorboat was towing a waterskiier whose college major is most likely in Hysteria. She makes more of a fuss than the kid and father did.

Wilkommen, Bienvenue, Welcooooome!

Flash forward eight years and two cousins, Ricky (Jonathan Tiersten) and Angela (Felissa Rose), are being sent off to camp by Ricky's absolutely demented mother (Desiree Gould), whose looks are reminiscent of the Emcee in Cabaret and whose delivery is too over-the-top, even for melodrama. She fusses over them and says "Wasn't that nice of me?!" a lot. She, being a doctor (surely not a GP, but a Barbra-Streisand-as-Mrs.-Focker kind of doctor) has filled out their physicals in an overly dubious manner, which she warns them not to draw attention to. I guess with this, we're either thinking that Dr. Demento here is an utter freak, or that the kids have some kind of creepy illness. Or perhaps both. Yeah, probably both.

The kids arrive at Camp Arawak, which appears to cater to the delicious age range of 13-18, facilitating all kinds of hilarious clashes and insults, and the younger ones ain't as meek as I expected! Ricky is one of those tough pubescents that Corey Feldman played a lot of. He kicks and spits and tells people to "eat shit" a lot. Angela is withdrawn; she never speaks to anyone, and has a permanent wide-eyed look of anxiety on her face. Ricky is very protective of her and makes her excuses when her introversion causes social spectacles.

Shit kicks off pretty early for Angela. In the girls' cabin, we have one bitch counsellor, Meg (Katherine Kamhi) and one overly-gentile counsellor, Susie (Susan Glaze), and for some reason, Meg's constant harrassment of Angela in front of others never seems to cost her her job. Ricky's friend Paul (Christopher Collet) takes a liking to Angela, but is being teased by the Jessica Rabbit of the camp, Judy (Karen Fields), who also makes it her mission to torment the girl. It struck me as a little odd that Judy seemed several years too old for a kid like Paul, but then, as is pointed out..."girls mature faster than boys."

It's not just the cabins that are filled with weirdos and assholes. The proprietor of the establishment is one Mel Costic (veteran Mike Kellin in his final role), the kind of cigar-chomping greaseball in checkered pants who'd be a more likely candidate for pornographic direction than for childcare management. Luckily, his right hand man is chipper and muscly Ronnie (Paul DeAngelo) who wears the speciality Eunoch range of shorts and gets the kids all pepped up for campouts and baseball games and whatnot. However, the rest of the staff are just as creepy as Mel...the first shot we get of the kitchen staff is unsettling to say the least. Head cook and professional fat slob Artie (Owen Hughes) stands leering over the "fresh chicken", telling the boys that where he comes from, "we call 'em Baldies." Wow...wherever he's from probably ain't on the map.

The pervert becomes the pervee

So what could possibly go wrong in a summer camp inhabited by teenage sluts, teenage assholes and the odd paedophile? Well writer/director Robert Hiltzik made the wise decision to nip the pervert character in the bud before it got too creepy to handle. Artie's comeuppance serves as the first in a nicely-varying range of mysterious killings going on at the camp, always shown from the killer's perspective with only their hands coming into view. And the best part is... every character does one of those hilarious unsuspecting lines of dialogue (which remains ambiguous so as not to give the game away) before getting sliced. Things like, "Oh, it's you, what the hell do you want?" To the film's credit, we are left changing our mind as to the culprit for a good half of the movie. Towards the end it filters down the suspects for us, until there's only one we haven't seen doing non-suspicious stuff at the right time.

I suppose the main thread of the story (which back in the '80s they did their best to include around the slashing) is Whatever Happened To Angela? The kids and counsellors get real sick o' her shit, and one day Meg decides to grab her and throw her into the lake, while Judy follows and taunts her. Meg remains within the camp's employment after this incident too. This, of course, further traumatises the girl, and when she finally gets to know Paul, their makeout session is interrupted by very weird flashbacks to Angela and her brother as children, and her father with his male lover. Well the story with Angela is the basis for Sleepaway Camp's notorious twist-ending, and because of its sudden nature, it was really impossible to be handled both as a serious subject and a shock....

***Spoiler Alert***

The means by which I came across Sleepaway Camp spoilt the ending for me. The terrific documentary Going To Pieces examined the 'rise and fall of the slasher movie', and interviewed Felissa Rose about various movies. When the time came to talk about her famous role, they lingered mostly on the infamous ending, complete with matching VT. So I sought out the movie because of the weird ending I had been given a glimpse of. Because even out of context, it struck me as a real killer of a twist! So, as aforementioned, the movie whittles it down, by process of elimination, to us suspecting Angela as the killer. And something is most definitely wrong when she meets Paul at the beach and insists they both get naked.Meanwhile, a single policeman has turned up, and the remaining counsellors do their best 'concerned' impressions, with highlights including, "Oh no...there's a killer on the loose". The cop sends the counsellors off to search the camp..."even the empty cabins," he advises. Wow, what would they have done without him?! Everyone knows that criminals never hide in unoccupied spaces!

Mr Short-Shorts has graciously changed into a full-length tracksuit. Well, I dunno. Perhaps his ball-bearing hotpants would have proved the killer's antidote. Never know. But he and Susie (possibly the worst-acted character in the whole picture) have gotten their pretty permed selves down to the lake, where they see Angela sat, humming and cradling Paul's head in her lap. They approach from behind, cooing her gently to come with them. Then another flashback, of crazy Aunt Doctor, inheriting little Peter after the opening speedboat accident killed his family, and deciding to raise the child as the girl she always longed for, deducting that two boys "simply will not do"... see where this is going? Up hops Angela, mouth agape and growling like an animal, Paul's severed head rolling from her lap. And there she is... naked... with a penis. A penis! In the words of Felissa Rose, "I was the chick with the dick!" 

Now, if this moment hadn't been the very reason I ended up watching the preceding 80 minutes, I would have been whooping and hollering at its awesomeness. Ironically killer twist: perfectly executed; puns most definitely intended. But I have one question about it...killer Angela remains perfectly still whilst the camera zooms out to reveal her secret. Why? Perhaps it was to accommodate the obviously immobile Felissa Rose mask worn by the drunken college boy stand in. I guess it doesn't really matter. Even if Angela's weirdly wooden stance was the only thing that gave me a weird feeling about the shot, then it still achieved its desired affects regardless.

One may also come to assess what the makers may have meant by this ending. It's deep enough to be about more than shock value, so what statement is Sleepaway Camp making? Some may argue that it's an offensive sweeping suggestion that transgender or transsexual people are in some way sociopathically ill. Some may also see a link between the brief flashbacks of Angela/ Peter's father in bed with another man and the child's subsequent issues, But on the other hand, is the real evil not, in fact, evil Doctor Auntie, who decided to gender-reassign little Peter to suit her own selfish ideals? Perhaps the plot was first imagined as a reversal on the life of a transgender person: where they might choose of their own accord to change their identity to how they feel is right, Peter is forced by someone else to change his identity to how he feels is wrong. This is probably not a terribly common situation, but perhaps by extension, it is a statement about children's need to be their own person, and not live out the ideals and fantasies of their parents or friends. The more thought I give it, the more meaning I see in this cheesy old slasher flick.

Terry from Reno 911! (right) and some fashion victim at camp (left)

Sleepaway Camp is the kind of movie that I felt the compulsion to tell my sister about. She and I are both raging horror connoisseurs and have shared many a movie, not to say we always agree. But I know she too would appreciate all the straight men dressed like Terry the Homo from Reno 911!, the surprisingly imaginative and gruesome killings (did I mention curling tongs getting put in the most ridiculous of places?!), and the kind of creepy predatory style that could only have been used thirty years ago. This is a wicked flashy piece of the '80s which takes a number of increasingly unexpected turns, and even in 2015 feels quite original. Sleepaway Camp is definitely one of my new favourite slashers!

Sarah T. - Portrait of a Teenage Alcoholic (1975)

This rad and retro little number comes from the funky annals of mid-'70s made-for-TV movies, and is one of several in a string of similar productions in the post-Exorcist career of the fabulous Linda Blair. Having been monitoring the situation since 2005 when I discovered Linda, I have seen Sarah T. be drip-fed to the internet very slowly over the course of a decade. My first glimpse was of a cute scene which occurs some 25 minutes in, in which Sarah (Linda Blair) sings Carole King's It's Too Late at a party as a very youthful Mark Hamill looks on endearingly. Only recently did the whole movie become available to watch, so I was very excited to finally view it in its full form.

Sarah Travis is a slightly shy and reserved fifteen-year-old who is pissed about her parents' divorce and her mother's courting of another gent, and the necessity of her starting at a new school. Things don't go too well, and nerves get the better of her during her audition for the Glee Club. Meanwhile, her father (J.R. himself, Larry Hagman) dips in and out of her life, blowing money he doesn't have on presents for her and then disappearing again. Sarah's mother's pride is hurt to see her daughter struggling to get along in society, so she is pleased when chipper young local kid Ken Newkirk (Mark Hamill) calls by and invites Sarah to a party. She is reluctant at first, but the kids there are quite receptive of her, and after a couple of stiff ones (drinks, that is) she feels groovy and ready to sing, clad in the amazing denim two-piece with matching Casey Jones hat that Daddy bought her.

One of the girls from school who's at the party was present at Sarah's ill-fated Glee Club audition, and so requests her song for her from the resident guy-with-guitar. Dear Lord, we give you thanks and praise for the shaggy-haired guitar guy in every '70s movie ever, Amen. She gives a really cute little performance with her newfound Dutch courage, and comes to the quick realization that booze is the answer to all of life's problems! Ken soon discovers her in a sloppy state and drags her home, apologizing profusely to her outraged mother, whose primary concern is what the neighbours will say.

Ken and Sarah grow close and between the not-so-subtle flask and cup in her locker and her popular boyfriend, things start to get better for Sarah. But as an AA counsellor later warns, booze starts out by giving, and then ends up taking. She gets ridiculously large booze orders delivered to the house, running the shower and pretending her mother is home to convince the guy to let her accept them. And when Mom finally notices watered-down Scotch, she jumps straight to blaming and firing the housemaid. Sarah witnesses the whole thing, and being the ultimately decent kid that she is, she feels ashamed and does try to argue her mother's decision, but to little avail. Home is getting crazier. Sarah fights with her mother, with one culminating in the classic outburst, "He's not my father, he's just somebody you sleep with!"

School is getting similarly tumultuous, with Sarah finally getting caught for cutting classes and forging notes. Her mother is called to the school about it, and poor Sarah pitifully tries to hint her mum into cutting her some slack ("Oh, that was that day, Mom, remember?") and the school counsellor tells Mother Travis in no uncertain terms that something dodgy must be going on at home to be causing this. Of course, Sarah's socially-conscious mother is utterly outraged by such an implication, and furiously reminds the counsellor that she has successfully raised an elder daughter who turned out with no problems.

Things get even worse. Sarah and Ken finally make love, but the very next day he is edgy and cold, and soon informs Sarah that he has to focus on his schoolwork, and can't afford to be distracted by a troubled, needy girlfriend. She is, naturally, heartbroken, having decided just a couple of days before that Ken was the guy she would lose her virginity to. Although Ken seems like a good kid, and a pretty sensible one too, it also appears that he's a sporter of the Schoolboy Insensitivity badge. He doesn't recognise the stupidity and downright assholishness of dumping a fifteen-year-old girl the day after taking her virginity. This situation would have explosive consequences in any case, but with Booze's recurring guest-star spot in Sarah's everyday life, things go from bad to worse. Whilst babysitting her young niece, she sorrowfully hits the bottle and blacks out on the couch. Her parents end up breaking into the house in panic, to find her in a very conspicuous state.

Sarah is a pitiful character throughout. It is good to see an ultimately preachy movie be made through the eyes of the people it's trying to preach to, and therefore decipherable to the loony horny teenagers out there. It's true that teenagers don't like to listen to anybody. I remember being the same. Feeling the ridiculousness of a schoolmarmish grey-haired nurse telling us about sex. The ridiculousness of her warning us to use condoms when performing oral sex, and then the humiliation of people's reactions to the suggestion in real life. Fact was, they were outdated and didn't seem to have a clue. And when adults make made-for-TV movies about drugs or booze or underage sex, they seem to have a difficult time of it. I imagine pained cries from the offices of NBC..."How do I reeeach these keeeeeds?!" Writers Richard and Esther Shapiro really tune in to the teen wave, and bring the material down to the audience's level, where we can feel sorry for Sarah as she takes one saddening blow after another, rather than look down on her for her methods of coping. So the kids can understand how people like them can succumb to terrible ways so easily, and how shitty it feels when they do, but how readily they could seek help. It is a story of warning, but also of redemption, which really seems like the right way to do it. If we're being presented with a problem, it's nice to be simultaneously dealt a solution.

Sarah attends an AA meeting, resentment brimming in her eyes, where she hears a 10-year-old kid talk. He's been an alcoholic since the age of 3, because his old man (one of those black-and-white Brando-as-Kowalski types by the sounds of it) would get him drunk and laugh his head off about it with his buddies. This made me double-take. Teenage alcoholics is one thing, but a fucking three-year-old?! It really got me thinking. Abuse in this world knows no limit, so what is so unbelievable about there being some degenerate asshole, who fathered an unwanted kid, spends his every unemployed day drinking and slobbing, and gets a real kick out of sousing the toddler and seeing his drunken, diaper-covered ass hit the deck? Although my mind had never before conceived such a wretched thought, and it hit me hard upon presentation, it's really no surprise at all. And that's a sad thought.

Sarah leaves the meeting, seemingly unaffected, and deliberately so. She just doesn't seem convinced, doesn't seem ready to quit. So you know what that means...a highly traumatic incident, as a result of her drinking, to shock her into quitting. And surprisingly, this doesn't seem to be the time that she approaches a bunch of young guys to buy her booze, and ends up sucking them all off for the privilege, only for them to drink it to themselves and beat her up. How low can things possibly get for this poor little creature? Well, now visibly on the brink, she wanders around one night and decides to take Ken's pet horse for a ride. Don't drink and ride, kids. In a very well-shot sequence, she rides the horse out to the freeway and causes a pile-up. Linda Blair is (or was as a young woman) a very accomplished equestrian, and it is my suspicion that her skills in this field helps them to pull off such an effective shot.

Comes the monumental trauma, when the very real aftermath of her drunken actions take place. Still on the freeway, blue and red lights flashing everywhere, surrounded by cops, Sarah watches, devastated, as the agonized horse is put down by a vet, and Ken is sobbing his heart out on the roadside. Now, given the former scene I just described, and the personal degradation and trauma that Sarah endured, it speaks volumes about her character that this horse incident would be the turning point for her. Causing harm to herself was of no concern to her, but as soon as she realized she had really harmed others, it was finally too much to bear. Sarah Travis is a good kid, and one we can relate to. It's easy to forget how quickly things can spin out until we're in the spiral. That night, Sarah could have stayed sat out in the dark, drinking by herself, and then eventually gone home and passed out. But she made one unwise decision after another, and within a matter of minutes, her very quiet evening had gone to full-blown legal issue with life lost and relationships irretrievably destroyed.

Sarah's problem now formally comes to everyone's attention, and she is checked into a hospital, where she has to finally come to terms with herself and accept the help that everyone is offering her. Her parents have to endure each other to discuss their daughter's issues, and after a bunch of screaming, they both seem to see their own faults as parents, with Mother Travis guiltily putting down a glass of scotch clutched in her hand. Sarah comes to her parents, looks them straight in the eyes, and tells them, "I'm an alcoholic." Her mother still seems unbelieving of the idea. She almost laughs at the unreality of it all. But if ever, she should be proud of her daughter now, for expressing remorse for her errors, and strength of belief in herself to correct them.

Sarah T. is a really good movie for its kind. Thoughtfully written, filmed with care, and well acted. Linda Blair is a good actress, whose career took an incredibly unfortunate downturn in the late seventies. In a documentary, I heard her detail how she got caught up in a drug charge, when a friend repeatedly phoned her to ask if she knew any potential clients. Eventually she said, "OK, I might know someone," and with that recorded sentence, the police had a conviction for their commission cheque. And as is not unbelievable in the slightest, Linda's lawyer advised that her best option was a no contest, as the cops would ensure that any trial would ruin her financially, and still convict her in the end anyhow. ACAB, eh? It is particularly unfortunate that she didn't manage any big comeback like Downey Jr. or Gibson, especially as, by all accounts, she wasn't even a user to begin with. But then, she was a young hot star in late '70s Hollywood, so I dunno. Perhaps her crippling typecasting was just too big an obstacle.

Her later-young career involved a very sexy direction, both, I imagine, by choice and as a last resort. Linda did some gorgeous glamour and nude shoots for various magazines, and my God, are they a sight for sore eyes! As her teenage movies constantly teased, she indeed had an incredible, voluptuous figure, and the most beautiful face, which radiated both youth and attitude. Then her only movie credits were regular low budget exploitation flicks, in which she often got naked. Yeah, it wasn't ideal a mere decade after she was an Oscar nominee on the cover of every entertainment magazine -- she had become a B-movie queen that we loved to see naked. But she really owned it, and didn't decide years later to spin it as a story of woe and detailing how she was used and abused. She stood by her decisions. Linda Blair is one cool chick.


....Right?!