El Machete Satánico: The Curse of El Charro (2005)

The Curse of El Charro (2005)

Rating: **1/2

Starring: Andrew Bryniarski, Danny Trejo, Drew Mia

Suffering from nightmares and bloody visions of a dark machete-wielding figure ever since she found her sister dead from suicide a year ago, Maria accepts an invitation from her roommate Chris to join her and her two friends, Tanya and Rose, at her uncle’s house in Saguaro, Arizona for some good old-fashioned debauchery, hopefully to get her mind off these ghoulish visages and relax a bit. Unbeknownst to her, these visions foreshadow a terrible fate upon her and her friends as Maria is actually a descendent of a girl from Saguaro who was terrorized and cursed by a wealthy yet diabolical land baron, El Charro, after she rejected his love for her. Now, El Charro wanders Saguaro as a murderous revenant, seeking to finish off the bloodline of the girl who broke his heart and he's going to do the same to just about anyone who gets in his way.

Or is simply in his way. As most undead murderers do. 

I wanted to like The Curse of El Charro (2005) a little more than your average slasher flick as it does have an interesting premise and some very artsy direction when it comes to its visuals, particularly during scenes involving horrifying visions and surreal nightmares. The mostly one-dimensional characters, though, as well as the fact that the plot really takes a while to get to the bloody massacre does test one's patience and knock the peg down a bit. 

The movie firstly spends a good deal of the its run on the girls' road trip misadventures like trying to seduce a horny cop into not busting them for speeding, encountering creepy rednecks at a dingy bar where the main attraction for the night is Lemmy Kilmister as a tuxedo-wearing crippled guy singing horribly off key, or picking up some guy dates who we all know are just there to boost up the bodycount, all the while our lead gal Maria's otherworldly trances kick in and out to keep things spooky. It isn't until the last act that our villain, the dirty poncho-wearing, mad machete-swinging El Charro finally waltzes in to do some murdering and, for its worth, the massacre is a messy yet respectable affair with a generous amount of blood work and sloppy body parts. The ending does veer into the outrageously silly with a downer of a swing, but at least it got a little chuckle out of me.

Bluntly, The Curse of El Charro (2005) is okay-ish. It certainly could've been better, but it's far from being completely awful. (I mean, it has Danny Trejo voicing El Charro. That has to count for something, right?) Pretty plain for a slasher flick and that's about the gist of it. 

Bodycount:

1 female seen dead from slit wrists (flashback)

1 female killed with a machete (flashback)

1 female killed with a machete (flashback)

1 male hanged on a noose (flashback)

1 female decapitated with a machete

1 male hacked to death with a machete

1 male slashed across the face with a machete

1 female had her jaw torn off

1 female had her throat slashed with a machete

1 female hacked to death with a machete

1 male decapitated offscreen, blood splash seen

1 female dragged away, killed offscreen

1 male hacked to death with a machete, decapitated

Total: 13

Big Bad Furry: The Director's Cut (2009)

The Director's Cut (Australia, 2009)
Rating: ***1/2
Starring: Jonathan Patrick Moore, Mollie King, David Maguire

After picking up the last talent they need through the auditions, arrogant director Mike and his female producer Bobby lead their small production crew to the outbacks so they can finally start filming their independent movie, a period mystery piece supposedly inspired by Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975). With guns.

The first day of filming is, to put it bluntly, troubled; an actor lost the digits of their hand in an accident, another actor quits after feeling insulted by an impromptu line, and an on-the-spot story change have them finding and tagging along a random gun nut so he can keep an eye on a borrowed pistol. Oh, and the assistant director (Called "#2") mysteriously dies overnight. Let's not forget about him.

Determined to finish his movie, however, Mike soldiers through the bickering crew and keeps the rotting corpse of their fallen comrade a secret, not knowing that his problems are about to get worse when someone dressed completely in a koala costume shows up one day to do some killing.

The Director's Cut (2009) is one of those obscurities made in hopes of entertaining the masses with the strange and unconventional, though its premise is basically a desert-set whodunit slasher with a movie-shoots-gone-bad backdrop, something done already with the likes of the comedic mockumentary Brutal Massacre: A Comedy (2003) and the easy yet fun Slaughter Studios (2002).

For a whole hour, the movie's more of a black comedy about the increasingly crappy luck down in the hot wilderness, as our crew suffers for a filming that barely made sense and would only get a single scene done. Most of the jokes are a hit or miss, though those that do land on a funny bone has a good wit on them and a bit of weirdness added in, mixing the nasty and the humorous in equal measures to keep the hectic yet strange tone up and steady.

The real fun of this chunk is the little twists and turns done for the character as we do get to know their quirks along the mishaps happening to and at them. The actors may not all be perfect but plenty have done enough to play the gags rights and deliver their roles to a likable extent, even when the slasher bits eventually rear its furry, cuddly head.

Throughout the film, we do get small indications that someone has been following our crew and is now lurking around the nearly abandoned set, though it is at the last half hour that The Director's Cut (2009) curiously welcomes our killer in full koala fursuit, carrying a case of acid. It's a surreal image that frankly works along the movie's build-up and atmosphere, stranger even that we never really get to know who is underneath the suit after all of the red herrings, blame-throwing and surviving our casts try to do. Most of the death scenes doesn't rally above the average mainstream slasher murders, but they do add up very nicely and a couple even packs a brutal surprise for how intense they were, or how out of nowhere they came in. Thrown in a little gruesome nudity and we have a well-worth bodycount climax full of entertaining death scenes and a villain which the movie refuses to identify, all the way down to its abrupt ending.

Hitting the weird factor with just the right amount of dread and surprises, The Director's Cut (2009) may not win a lot for its dark comedy despite having some clever and chuckle-worthy moments, but this is without a doubt one of the better indie-slashers I've seen that deals with killer mascots. It's a tad rare so should you find the chance to see or own this little gem, hesitate not!

Bodycount:
1 male found dead in his sleep
1 female unknowingly bathes in acid, shot
1 male immolated in explosion
1 male impaled in the eye with a tripod leg
1 female found stabbed in the back with knives
1 male shot in the chest with an arrow
1 male had his throat cut with a knife
1 male shot in the mouth
1 male disappears, presumably killed
1 female strangled with a rope
1 male presumably killed
Total: 11

When Trailer Park Girls Cry: Far From Home (1989)

Far From Home (1989)
Rating; ***
Starring: Matt Frewer, Drew Barrymore, Richard Masur

Starring a tweenage Drew Barrymore as Joleen Cox, Far From Home (1989) follows her and her character's divorced father Charlie driving cross country throughout almost an entire Summer for a journalism job, until their gas tank runs low enroute back to their Los Angeles home. They eventually end up wandering around a nearby Nevada town of Banco where they have to stay at for a bit as its only gas station's dried out and the next fuel source around is at least another drive away.

Renting out a trailer from guest ranch owner Agnes, Joleen, desperate for some romance and excitement, gets smitten by Agnes’ mysterious teenage son Jimmy, who may or may not be all that safe to be around with considering he's a bit of a bullying creeper with voyeuristic tendencies and a rapey-side. And with the town's suddenly outbreak of suspicious deaths picking off residents one by one, Joleen fears she might be flirting with the top suspect of these murders and that she might be next on the hit list.

Mildly entertaining at its best, Far From Home is, without a doubt, targeted to tweens with its depictions of a youthful struggle to gain an adult perspective on life, managing control on said perspective, as well as one's brooding interest for the opposite sex. It does this alternatively between being laughably cheesy and borderline exploitative at some (nothing too explicit, though the leering shots of a two-piece clad Barrymore feels rather unnecessary), showing off the dangers that would come from an unready mindset and how some innocent acts can have troubling drawbacks. All of this through an otherwise predictable murder mystery with shared slasher elements.

Considering the small number of casts and momentous amount of horror and thriller clichés played, it wasn't that hard to figure out the identities of both the killer and red herrings. In a way, the direction and pace of the movie makes a lot of sense, but the lack of surprises and creative curves just dull the impact of the plot. Add the matter that the kills aren't particularly graphic (but it does have its small share of ingenuity at times), Home could have been a lot more stale and forgettable if it wasn't for the cast; Barrymore and Matt Frewer make a cogent father-daughter pair, even if majority of the focus was around Barrymore's moody Joleen transitioning between adolescence and adulthood. Richard Masur has a fun surrogate uncle feel for his role as Duckett, a Vietnam veteran living with a mantra that help shouldn't come at a price, while Jennifer Tilly and Karen Austin as Amy and Louise respectively were sweet in their enjoyable supporting roles as two women also stranded in the town, ready to befriend the father-daughter pair.

There's also a great deal of atmosphere present as the desert's sense of isolation from urban civilization makes everything a serious debacle, may it be finding gasoline or hiding from a knife-wielding killer during sandstorms. The climax itself utilizes this predicament greatly with its cat-and-mouse final act, a small reward for sitting through what is technically a young adult mystery novel turned feature length viewing.

 Easy on the mind while passing around creepy vibes and interesting characters, Far From Home (1989) doesn't offer much in weight as a teen thriller with a bodycount but, for what it is, it's a watchable effort that tries to be potential game changer for one of its decade's well-loved child stars. See for the cheap thrills and ham and you'll do just fine.

Bodycount:
1 male found shot on the head
1 female electrocuted in a tub with a tossed electric fan
1 female caught inside a burning car
1 female found dead, body preserved in ice
1 male had his throat cut with a hunting knife
1 male shot, falls and lands on a satellite dish
Total: 6

Beauties and Beasts: The Furies (2019)

The Furies (Australia/United Arab Emirates, 2019) (AKA "Killer Instinct")
Rating: **1/2
Starring: Airlie Dodds, Linda Ngo, Taylor Ferguson

Kidnapped and let loose in the middle of nowhere, Kayla finds herself in a sinister survival game where girls are hunted down by a group of masked killers, with the resulting carnage getting broadcast for the viewing pleasure of shadowy patrons. As she attempts to make her way to save a fellow kidnapped friend as well as stay alive herself, Kayla will soon understand that the game's rules are about to get as macabre as the fiends prowling around and that the line between friend and foe isn't as black-and-white as she expected.

The Furies (2019), for a good chunk of it, is pure eye candy for gorehounds and slasher fans as apart from delivering some credible backwoods stalk-and-stab fun that often leads to a gloriously gory murder scene done wholesomely in practical effects, there's also a sweet slice of ghastliness given to the designs of the plentiful killers featured here, ranging from the ghoulishly simple to the ridiculously creative. (Skincrow and Rotface for the win, baby! Dirty Ken can have a honorable mention, too!) The twist of this whole shebang being a death game, however, complicate matters as it added elements to The Furies (2019)'s otherwise simplistic survival horror route, deconstructing it into something both unique and frustrating.

On one end, it is nice to see something different being done to what could have been another backwoods bodycounter, even if said difference is nothing new with movies like $LA$HER$ (2001) and Paintball (2007) already bagging have the whole "we kill people for sport and viewers" thing within the slasher subgenre. (Among many, I assume) The game's rules did give our characters an interesting strategy to survive, doubling as a source of drama and conflict that eventually blurs the line between allies and monsters. Sadly, the story's deconstructive writing couldn't pick whether it wanted to be serious or outrageously exploitative, so it hardly elevated its tone and characters from more than one to two notes, thus making it hard to genuinely root for anyone (Save for Airlie Dodds, who did her most to make a sympathetic final girl out of Kayla) and the attempted seriousness forced upon us just feels laughable.

For its worth, The Furies (2019) is mercifully quick in pacing and it at least looks capable with the rest of its production past the gore effects; the abandoned gold mine oasis in the middle of a desert is a nice backdrop that we don't often see used around slasher flicks, captured and implemented well enough through a competent camera work. Its expressively booming score may have the tendency to sound a wee bit cartoonish at times, but it works quite alright with the cheesier parts of the movie. All in all, if you can look beyond the lackluster world building and satire, this is a film one can well enjoy for its silliness and strong showcase of gore given they don't mind their slashers lean and swift.

Bodycount:
1 male eviscerated with a scythe
1 female had her face sliced off with an axe
1 female had her arms torn off
1 male had his head explode
1 female hacked on the neck with a machete
1 male impaled with a screw
1 female had her head hacked in half
1 male had his head explode
1 male axed on the chest
1 female had her throat cut
1 male had his head explode
1 male tortured with a hunting knife, killed
Total: 12

The $9000 Budget Knows: Delirium (2007)

Delirium (2007)
Rating: *
Starring: Mike Burnell, Tallia Cuellar, Louie Del Monico

Right off the bat, you can see, feel and hear the $9000 micro-budget this movie limited itself with, but should I be worried? Afterall, it didn't took millions to budget The Mutilator (1985) or Truth or Dare? A Critical Madness (1986) and these films end up being some of my favorite guilty pleasures. Who's to say this one's gonna suck?

Then again, those films were at least creative with their outrageous kills and have an overall cheesy play on its plot, while Delirium (2007) have murders that are okay-ish(?) because micro-budget. Oh, boy...

Buddies Lucy and Sandra, token black dude Brad and backpack-carrying geek Dennis see a flyer at campus one day, in which dude bro-type Kirk and his hottie girlfriend Reyna are looking for people to hang out with them at a Spring Break party and share the cost of the trip. Taking up the offer, these four college kids are next seen on the road with the inviting couple, stopping in a diner to grab a bite or two and ask for shortcuts.

The trip goes from good to worse, however, when their car breaks down and the nearest town happens to be a long walk away through the evening. Under the scorching heat and with tension rising among the group, the teens will soon find out that the wilderness isn't the only thing threatening them as a mysterious shady figure begins to follow them with murder in mind.

As much as I don't want to see Delirium (2007) as this bad horror flick since it does have its good points such as its easy to swallow plot and a few passable gore, I can't really help but feel so underwhelmed and distracted from the its low-budget execution. The dialogue's cheesed-up whenever you get the chance to hear them properly and the acting that goes along the way is nearly as laughable as the choreography done for the fight scenes at the last third of the movie, none of which helping the fact that the characters are so cliched that they're pretty predictable to the point of boring. (Yeah, that's definitely another guy playing the killer. Not one of the quieter teens!)

I know that this is a do-it-yourself flick with mostly inexperienced actors and a budget of nearly ten grand, but a little more imagination and livelier execution definitely could have save this movie from being so bland and unexciting, both this film succeeds on doing even with the clear Italian giallo aesthetics they're going for with the killer's motif and scenes. Needless to say, the uninspired simplicity of both Delirium (2007)'s story and direction may have placed it to the void of forgotten rentals, collecting dusts along with other dull micro-budget cheap frights that only hardcore horror collectors would dwell to in and out from time to time.

Bodycount:
1 male had his throat slashed with a knife
1 female gutted with a hunting knife
1 female hacked to death with a meat cleaver
1 male had a hand lopped off with a meat cleaver, hacked on the head
1 male shot on the head

Total: 5

Bottom Barrel Scraps Vol 1

Coz sometimes, there is such as thing as too long reviews for movies that are so bad, dull and/or boring, they don't deserve them.

Blackburn (2015)
Rating: 1/2
Starring: Sarah Lind, Zack Peladeau, Emilie Ullerup

A group of college kids driving across the backwoods mountain route find themselves taking a detour after a horrible CGI landslide blocks their path. The new route unfortunately takes them to the hunting grounds of a murderous backwoods clan consisting of burnt nuthouse escapees, lead by female psycho in a wedding dress.

If you have seen one or two Wrong Turn movies, then you can expect the same kind of bloodshed from Blackburn, down to the fact that it takes place in the woods, there might be some cannibalism involved and that there's more than one deformed killer hunting the cast down. It could have been all fine and fun but indistinguishable antagonists and the painfully boring protagonists just made this movie rather pointless to exist and a chore to watch, somehow worse with its attempt to develop some love triangle-teenage pregnancy conflict within the small casts of stereotype slasher meat. At least the victims get to die through gory deaths, right? No, no they didn't. It's bloody, yeah, but it's hardly anything you have not seen 50 slasher flicks before.

Generic plotting, uninspired. So, no. Just, no. Any backwood slasher (save for Don't Go In The Woods (1981)) is better than this forgettable bear turd of a movie.

Bodycount:
1 male murdered offcamera
1 female had her neck snapped
1 female found dead from a rockslide
1 male hacked to death with a pickaxe
1 female murdered, fingers and toes chopped off (flashback)
1 female murdered (flashback)
1 male mentioned knifed to death (flashback)
A number of individuals killed in a burning building (flashback)
2 females skewered from head to death with a rod
1 male shot with an arrow
3 males seen taxidermied
A number of victims seen
1 female hacked on the back with a hatchet, blowtorched on the face
1 male set on fire
1 male knifed through the throat
1 female gets a buzzsaw to the gut, falls unto a burning gear
Total: 17

K-Shop (United Kingdom, 2016)
Rating: *
Starring: Lucinda Rhodes Thakrar, Scot Williams, Ewen MacIntosh

Here's one movie that started out promising; a British Pakistani moves in to his father's kebab shop in the middle of a bad UK district only to have said dad beaten dead in the pavement by some drunken rowdies. Out of this tragedy rises an anti-hero who murders drunkards and serves their flesh as delicious kebab meat, kinda like a modern day Middle-Eastern Sweeney Todd. All of this in the first 30 to 40 minutes in a two-hour movie. What happens afterwards, you ask? Said Anti-hero feeling shit-sorry about himself, contemplating about continuing his murder-canniballism shtick or not. This meant a lot of talking, self-loathing and our protagonist just being an ass to not just himself, but to a whole lot of people, too. Not a lot of gory killings to follow either. Whoopee-fucking-doo-NOT!

A lot of peeps call this a black comedy but I don't see the kind of dark comedy I'm used to here. It kinda did at the beginning and I was pretty certain it will eventually go down the "haha-coz-it's-horrible" kind of gig, but all I got were "I-kill-people-and-yet-I-still-feel-empty-wa-wa-wa" downer talks. The whole thing is just too long for it's own good and whatever message they're trying to relay just got muddled along the way. If there's anything this film did for me, apart from one satisfying murder of a drunk dyke, it'll be the strange craving for meaty Pakistani kebab.

And now that I brought that up, anyone of you knows a good Pakistani restaurant in Manila?

Bodycount:
1 male hit his head on the pavement
1 male had his face burnt in a deep fryer, dismembered
1 female had her throat cut with a cleaver
1 female murdered offcamera, arm seen
1 male murdered offcamera, clothes seen
1 male dies from stab wounds
Total: 6

The Laughing Mask (2014)
Rating: *1/2
Starring: Floyd Adams, Arisia Aguiar, Jade Aguiar

In its core, The Laughing Mask is less of a slasher movie and more of a cop drama with gory torturous murders and shit load of uninspired acting befitting a smut flick. It follows a group of law enforcers, including two rival detectives, as they trail along the bloody breadcrumbs left by the titular killer, all the while preventing the murder of one disgruntled writer who lost his family to the laughing maniac and just announced his pure hate against the vigilante in nationwide television.

So, here we have a group of actors pretending to be cops, criminals and everyday fillers bundled together in a movie about a serial killer who not only slays deserving victims, but occasionally keeps some alive to torment. It's a big shoe to fill in if I may say so myself and I will commend some of the efforts done here, but the downer comes at the fact that the executed final product could have been better. Apart from the terrible talents involved and the camera work just looking uninspired, there's also pacing as slow as a snail high on shrooms, the inserted footages of black and white cartoons for the sake of surrealism just didn't work for me, and the use of 40s to 50s carabet music throughout the bloody rampages just gets tiring and annoying real quick.

The Laughing Mask tries to be so many things all at once that I easily lost track of the story and I hardly cared about who lives and dies, so much so that I actually stopped watching this movie halfway and decided to mend my boredom with a double feature of Fender Bender (2016) and Ditch Day Massacre (2016), didn't touch it for at least a week until I decided to man up and finish the damn thing for the sake of this review.

Did not regret stopping halfway, but did regret deciding to see this movie in the first place.

Bodycount:
1 female killed with a peeling knife
1 female electrocuted to death
1 male electrocuted to death
1 male gets a blowtorch to the mouth
1 male shot on the head
1 male murdered offcamera
1 male used as a human shield, shot dead
1 male had his throat slashed with a knife
1 female hacked with a sword
1 female garroted
1 male had his throat cut with a knife
1 male pinned to the floor with knives, dismembered with a chainsaw
1 male decapitated with a machete
1 male shot
1 male slashed on the throat with a dagger
1 male stabbed with a dagger
1 male shot
1 male shot on the head
1 male shot
1 female shot
1 male shot
1 male shot on the head
1 male shot to death
1 girl seen drugged, presumably killed
1 female brained with a bat
1 female stabbed with a dagger
1 male castrated with a garden shear
Total: 27

Wonder Valley (2015)
Rating: 1/2
Starring: Suziey Block, David Michaelson, Natalie Pero

A girl suffering from vividly bloody nightmares decides to join her bestfriend and two other guys at a camping trip to some barren valley to ease up her some anxiety issues. None of this is going to end well, of course, as a random shadowy loon with a pickaxe starts to hack them down and possibly cannibalize.

What got me into watching this was its relatively short running time, thinking that even if Wonder Valley will turn up pretty bad, at least it'll be over soon. But holy Hell, was the pacing slow! It actually felt like couching through a friggin millennia as the movie's very muffled audio quality, glitchy editing (the title card just appears in a split second), and grimy video tone made everything hard to follow and there's barely any real slasher action happening to make up for the goddamn wait!

I guess the people behind this weren't aiming for a paint-by-number slasher flick but rather some sort of psychological survival treatment utilizing the barrenness of the desert for an extra creep factors coz, y'know, it's not like we have not done anything like that before. (The Hills Have Eyes series, Blood Frenzy (1987), Scalps (1984), The Hitcher series, Dust Devil (1992), Duel (1971)... Nope! We haven't done anything like that!) Should that be the case then, I may be no expert in writing psychological horror flicks but the last time I saw one, you got to have the right hook to reel us in like, I dunno, interesting characters or premise? Wonder valley has four campers in a very rocky valley, with one of them having bloody nightmares that really doesn't add up to anything. The only psychological horror I can squeeze out that notion is the fact I got the unfortunate luck to watch it. Enough, said! Trash this one!

Bodycount:
1 victim missing, glasses seen
1 female hacked on the head with a pickaxe
1 male decapitated with a knife
1 female had her throat cut with a knife
1 male stabbed on the neck with a knife
Total: 5

Death By Rusty Nail: Joy Ride 2: Dead Ahead (2008) and Joyride 3: Roadkill (2014) Double Bill Review

Back all the way in the late 90s and early 2000s, teen horror seems to have expanded from cheap slasher flicks and made it as far as influencing werewolf movies (Ginger Snaps), scifi (The Faculty) and even found footage horror. (The Blair Witch Project) So it wasn't too long before we get teen psychological thrillers and I do recall a good amount of them from my childhood such as Fear (1996), The Skulls (2000) and, the film that started today's covers, Joy Ride (2001).

Now despite its video and cable-based cult fave status, I only find Joy Ride as an "okay" thriller, obviously influenced by better films such as Spielberg's Duel (1971) and Robert Harmon's The Hitcher (1986) but hardly doing much for its own other than relying less on actual bloodletting with a more focused direction on tension, and introducing to us a creepy and demented trucker named Rusty Nail, a nearly invisible presence save for his cool voice ala CB radio. It's clever on a level but not enough to win me over as a fan, though enough to at least recognize the movie's existence.

This being said, I've been following this strange series out of curiosity and I have to say, it is speaking to me quite differently per entry.

Joy Ride 2: Dead Ahead (US/Canada, 2008)
Rating: **1/2
Starring: Nicki Aycox, Nick Zano, Laura Jordan

While still holding on to its psychological roots, Dead Ahead is a Direct to Video follow-up that tries to do things differently: unlike the first Joy Ride wherein Rusty Nail was mostly a disembodied voice and only revealed in the flesh during a few scenes at the climax, this sequel decided to give Rusty a more hands-on approach to some of his terrorizing, all the while still playing the mind games he is known for.

For this entry, some young adults are driving to Las Vegas for a bachelor party only to get themselves lost and walking on foot after their car breaks down in the middle of a desert. In their travel, they find a seemingly abandoned house with an unusually unspoiled Chevy Chevelle parked inside, which they decide to "borrow" from the owner in hopes of driving it out to town and get some help.

Unfortunately for them, the owner of the house is none other than our killer trucker, Rusty Nail (Mark Gibbon), and he is obviously pissed that somebody just stole his ride. (Why not? It's a friggin' Chevy Chevelle!) In his typical fashion, Rusty somehow finds the kids and kidnaps one of them, using the boy as the bait and prize for a series of sadistic games he will be playing with the rest.

For a good run, Dead Ahead sticks as closely to the tone of the original as possible, delivering a good sense of suspense and dread as the group is soon forced to do extreme measures to get their friend back including severing a stranger's finger and walking across a group of drugged-up and possibly homophobic truckers cross-dressed.

However, as fun as these tests and games are, it is noticeable that the spirit of the original was waiving away for other added elements, mainly a stronger emphasis on our anti-villain as well as an actual bodycount and some torture scenes, more made obvious with the victims here being more akin to your stereotyped slasher meat and hardly doing much to develop themselves as characters despite the series of danger they're put through. In fact, the cast have this cheesy B-flick feel to them, which in turn leads to a cheaper (if not completely absent) atmosphere that itself struggling to work seeing there's no actual mystery on who is on the other side of the CB radio, logic is barely considered (Mr. Nail survives an impossible explosion. How?) and the killings are too over-the-top. (Death by razor wallet chain, anyone?)

Strangely, I don't mind this as much as the next cult fan does, considering the fact that I am used to the cheese and gory kill count. There is no hiding that Dead Ahead is a step down in almost every aspect compared to the original, but it didn't stop its producers to do the best they can to catch up with then's resurgence of gore films. In turn, I admire some of the effort; as mentioned, the tricky mind games are still present and may just be as workable as the ones from the first, and the added bonus of slasher-esque murders, though looking a tad weird at times, is a welcome element for my book.

Not the definitive example of a great thriller/slasher hybrid, but a fair one nonetheless.

Bodycount:
1 female gets her head caught on a truck window, decapitated against a trailer
1 male had his jaw sliced off with a razor wallet chain
1 female ran over with a truck
1 male impaled through the head with a metal rod
Total: 4

Joy ride 3: Roadkill (2014)
Rating: ***
Starring: Ken Kirzinger, Jesse Hutch, Benjamin Hollingsworth

And continuing this franchise further into the slasher melting pot is this 2014 entry, Joy Ride 3: Roadkill. Now, this is where I believe the big wigs behind Fox Home Entertainment just threw their arms in the air and said "Fuck it!" as the plot seems hardly attempting anything at this point. Save, of course, a generous slice of gory killings.

Rusty Nail is back once again (now played by Freddy vs Jason's Ken Kirzinger coz why not?) and, for this run, young and rowdy racers will be feeling his wrath when they decided to play a little joke on him while on their way to a road rally with their souped-up race car.  Of course, our demented trucker didn't take their stunt too kindly, leading to him kidnapping the lead driver's girlfriend and starting another brutal killing spree that have these kids losing more than just a mere race.

More or less, Roadkill tries to be fun and it succeeds at some point; there are some decent car stunts at work in this movie but the opening is just a hoot of a starter, a neat SAW-esque piece involving a chained druggie couple, a speeding truck, and a stunt reminiscent of the Ship's Mast scene from Quentin Tarantino's "slasher" Death Proof. The rest of the killings are also gory enough to keep the blood and gore hounds at bay, looking like as if our trucker learned a thing or two from the torture porn era as a good amount of his murders have a sadistic death trap feel to them.

In turn, Rusty Nail is in full-on slasher mode as he no longer hides in the shadows to play his games, personally taking out the meat trash with an array of trucker oriented demises, all the while spatting out cryptic liners and surviving impossible demises. (Think a bonafide Freddy Kreuger/Michael Myers hybrid)

With the killings and the killer being the high points of the movie, Roadkill works better if it stuck to the slasher conformity through and through. Again, it did a good job at that (hell, they even included a classic doomsayer who warns them not to go across Slaughter Alley for obvious reasons), but its little attempts to build up tension over our characters may have knocked a few good points back. For one, there were moments that made the casts likable at a level as these scenes have them look and feel like close friends; some worked, others didn't, but the net result still leads to them devolving into screaming idiots who make dumb decisions after dumb decisions. This wouldn't be a terrible thing if the killings occur to dispatch them at a momentum, but the direction Roadkill have slows down in the middle of the run, spreading out the murders apart from one another while leaving little to nothing interesting happening in between as the plot crawls further to a half lethargic finale.

It was as if the movie was still trying to capture the psychological horror of the first, but with the kind of characters, direction, focus and, surprisingly, cheese Roadkill have (a website designed to trace back plate numbers to their owners? Only in a cheesy slasher (and the deep web), gentlemen!), the Hitchcockian trope's way long gone at this point. Still, I find this an admirable effort and I cannot dismiss it as I did enjoyed this a lot better than the last sequel. It's so far from the original in terms of tone that I can't help but see this as a standalone movie, penned and directed by Declan O'Brien, who is noteworthy for cooking up Wrong Turn 3 to 5 and should explain the gruesome grue. The production also looks a lot better compared to Dead Ahead, though there are some editing nitpicks (I think I saw the camera man's shadow at the opening!) and audio concerns regarding its soundtrack and score.

Overall, I think I prefer Roadkill the most from the Joy Ride franchise as my entertainment piece. It's manageable and watchable despite its slow moments and torture scenes, a new addition to my steady number of guilty pleasures!

Bodycount:
1 male mangled under a truck
1 female mangled to bits under a truck
1 male had his face shredded through a truck engine's fan
1 male ran through with a truck, immolated in car crash
1 male crushed to death with chained rail spikes
1 male had his head crushed with a jack lever
1 female crushed in half against a bridge's bracing
Total: 7

~~~

And there you have Joy Ride 2: Dead Ahead and Joy Ride 3: Roadkill! One movie transitioning from psychological teen horror to teen slasher, and another movie fully transitioned into the bodycounting side. Not the brightest move to make in terms of franchising a potential road thriller but, just as some people still watch the new Puppet Master sequels despite how God-awful cheap they mostly are, or how some kids out there will probably scream their parents' ears off if they don't buy or rent the latest Alpha and Omega movie, these two sequels will still find an audience. Will there be a chance for another Joy Ride sequel in the future? Hopefully. Hopefully not. Whatever may be the case, I'm just hoping they would explain why in each movie, Rusty Nail gets leaner, fitter and taller!

Until then...

Here's Brain-Damaged Barry wishing you a good ride!

Wanna Play Cowboys?: Death Valley (1982)

Death Valley (1982)
Rating: ***
Starring: Paul Le Mat, Catherine Hicks, Stephen McHattie

At times, simplicity in a plot can go a long way if executed rather unconventionally.

From a glance, Death Valley (1982) doesn't sound like your typical slasher flick as it doesn't deal with busloads of teenagers driving to their doom. Instead we have Billy, a young boy from a divorced family, being sent off to a holiday with his mum Sally and her childhood bud-turned-boyfriend Mike, which the kid isn't too excited about as he would rather spend some time with his beloved dad.

Determined to give the boy a good time, Sally and Mike decided to drive through the near-barren Arizona desert to visit a Western themed novelty town, who Billy is a fan of. Amidst their trip, they stop at the titular Death Valley to take a break, wherein the boy stumbles upon a seemingly empty mobile home and picks up a peculiar looking frog necklace. Unknown to him, however, the necklace belongs to a serial killer who just recently murdered the van's occupants and, after being made aware of this little slip-up, is now determined on snuffing the life out of the tyke and too those who got in the way.

For a good slice of the run, Death Valley (1982) focuses on the dynamics between lil' Billy and the trying Mike as they awkwardly attempt to either trust the other or be trusted. Sometimes these building moments can get a bit cheesy and half-hearted, quite not sure if it is intentional or the acting was a just tad off, but it does call for some developments rarely tackled by other slasher flicks of its decade, showing both boys as flawed yet understandable in the simplest manner.

This transitions quite nicely to the slasher portions of the movie, pretty much starting early with Billy stumbling upon a murder site and going on close calls with one intense scene involving the killer spotting the bespectacled Billy alone inside one of the novelty town's attractions and begin shooting live rounds at his young target, who in turn not knowing it was for real. Things subdue once a while only for the ball to get rolling again no soon after with Mike and Sally going on a date and leaving little Billy alone at a motel with a hired sitter. And we all know how sitters end in a film like this.

What soon leads is a third act filled with fairly entertaining stalk-and-hunt sequences as the kid finds himself prowled upon by a loonie who spouts obscurities and loves to tap dance on rooftops. As silly as some of these scenes are, they are equally fun and tense as the killer has no problem showing just how unhinged he is, destroying anything and anyone to intimidate his targets and even packing a nice but slightly foreseeable twist regarding him.

Overall, as a slasher, Death Valley (1982) tries to play a different game by broadening its casts as people rather than just characters. Though this seems only applied to the main leads, it still works quite an advantage for the movie as not only we learned to feel for the leading family, but it also brought something new to the table, at least for its time when nearly all slasher victims are dumb horny teenagers. In turn, the film barely boasts a high bodycount and some of the kills were on the tame side, but if the final product is a steady flow from point A to point B, with bloody good stalkings and killings to boot, I'm okay with it! 

With all of this, I say Death Valley (1982) is a worthwhile watch for slasher fans and for willing horror junkies who wouldn't mind some cheesy family drama over their dead teenagers. Tame as it may be, it at least has character!

Bodycount:
1 male gets a throat cut with a knife
1 male found with throat cut
1 female slaughtered offcamera with a knife
1 male hacked with a pickaxe
1 female gets her throat cut with a knife
1 male shot dead
1 male hit by a car, lands and impaled on an agave plant
Total: 7

My Mother Told Me To Never Do This: The Hitcher (1986)

The Hitcher (1986)
Rating: ****
Starring: Rutger Hauer, C. Thomas Howell, Jennifer Jason Leigh

Jim Halsey was just a young man delivering a car across the country when he stopped for a hitchhiker one rainy night. The vagabond introduced himself as John Ryder and while he seems calm and quiet at first, he changes once they passed by a rundown car; Jim jokingly asked if that was Ryder's reason for hitchhiking and he answered yes...coz he had cut off the driver's legs... and his arms... and his head...

And he is going to do the same to him.

Panicking from the sudden turn of events, Jim notices that Ryder hadn't put on his seat belt and the car door wasn't locked; after an excruciating moment of have the tip of a knife by his neck, he kicked the hitcher out and drives on, sure that he will never see the maniac again.

That was until morning comes and Jim finds himself not only stalked by Ryder, but also pinned for the maniac hitcher's killings. Now hunted down by both Ryder and local police, Jim has no choice but to survive this nightmare and find a way to escape it.

Best described as Steven Spielberg's 1971 debut road horror film Duel with a knife-wielding gun-totting psycho in place of a monstrous truck, The Hitcher was originally scripted as a gory slasher with more onscreen carnage and exploitation, but got toned down through various rewrites when the executives feared it was too violent to be picked up. The final result is less of a paint-by-number bodycounter and more of a Hitchcockian thriller on the road, a final draft that proved itself to be just as worthy of a watch as any bloody slashers in the late 80s.

This said, the movie is more of a situation study between an everyday man, Jim Halsey, and an unstoppable force, which comes into the form of a mysterious fellow who calls himself John Ryder. The entire film itself is an inescapable pattern of nightmare logic that gradually gets worse by the minute, focusing on Halsey being harassed with situation upon situation that puts not only a strain on himself in every way, but also to those that just happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. People die, people get hurt, all in an apparently meaningless mayhem caused by one hitcher.

It was never fully explained who -or what- the hitcher is in turn, as Ryder's uncanny ability to appear whenever Halsey thinks he is safe from him, as well as efficiently do all of the slaughtering that no simple man can do alone, gave him and the entire movie a near-supernatural feel despite implications of being human. It's this kind of uncertainty that made the atmosphere and direction of this film so effective, as one can never be certain as what will happen next and that anybody can be a victim to the hitcher's madness, making scenes wherein body parts suddenly show up on food and victims are suddenly found kidnapped and in peril all that shocking.

And true enough, The Hitcher may be tame on the blood department, but the fantastic set-ups and brooding tension courtesy of the score and imagery helped the simplest things in making up for the movie's near-dry run, somewhat proving that "less is more" could work just as good in terrifying us.

Playing the titular villain is Rutger Hauer and he does one of the most intimidating and selling performances as a ruthless madman without a reason. He is rarely seen angry and mostly wears a wry and malicious smile on his face, much adding to the air of mystery and threat from the character that goes so well with his robotic tone and murders. Heck, it was even stated that actor C.Thomas Howell (who played Jim) was uneasy around him, which may have helped the boy's frightened performance and isolated well-being as effective as possible on screen.

Thrown in between these men is Jennifer Jason Leigh's character Nash, a tough and spunky gal who became the motivation for Howell's character to step up and end the wickedness once and for all, seeing her as a light of hope in his dreadful predicament. It's going to be hard talking about this character without spoiling a few things for those of you who hadn't seen the film yet, but let's just say her presence and purpose was a good one, in a rather dark and horrifying twist.

Beautiful in terms of imagery, nail-biting in direction, cast of interesting characters, effectively simple bodycount, what else can I say about The Hitcher? Perhaps the only flaw I can try to think about it would be that, when it doesn't hit you right, it can be a little sluggish at times; I find the slow pace necessary for build, but I know people who prefers their boogeyman killing a victim in every five minutes so the brooding and implied murders can leave an unsatisfied aftertaste for these kind of folks. There's also the numerous plot holes and dumb decisions but, again, this movie was originally going to be a slasher movie so these brain-fart moments are inevitable.

I can say it now that The Hitcher is not gonna be for everyone, but if you are the kind of person who can learn to understand and appreciate a good cult classic, is open for ideas, or simply a true hardcore horror fanatic, this road horror is highly recommended for your viewing pleasure. Find it and buy it!

Bodycount:
1 male mutilated and beheaded (implied)
1 male, 1 female, 1 boy and 1 girl implied slaughtered
1 female and 1 driver missing, presumably killed
1 male found with throat cut
1 male found shot on the chest
1 male found murdered
2 males shot on the neck
4 males killed in car collision
1 male shot, killed in helicopter crash
1 male killed in helicopter crash
4 males killed in car collision
1 female chained between trucks, torn in half
4 males shot death with a shotgun
1 male shot on the chest with a shotgun
Total: 28