Carnography

Martin (1978)

RIP George A Romero. The iconic horror director and creator of the 1968 Night of the Living Dead and the (original) series that came from it, died this weekend at the age of 77. It was Romero's zombie film that gave us the modern perception of the undead as shambling, flesh-eating ghouls instead of the mindless voodoo slaves that they had been portrayed as previously. But Romero directed more than just zombie films, including the film he considered to be his personal favourite, Martin.

Martin Mathias is a young man travelling from Indianapolis to Braddock, Pennsylvania to stay with his elderly relative, "Tateh" Cuda. Martin is also a vampire - or at least he believes himself to be one. We see him break into a woman's sleeping cabin on the train, drug her and then slice her wrists with razor blades to drink her blood (killing her in the process). Cuda (who dresses like Colonel Sanders for a lot of the movie) also believes Martin to be a vampire, calling him "Nosferatu" and hanging garlic and crucifixes all around the home to try to keep Martin at bay. None of it works, of course - Martin may be a vampire, but those things are just superstitions and "old magic" which doesn't exist. Martin - who claims he is 84 years old, even though he barely looks 20 - has evolved his vampiric practices over the years to leave no traces of his predilections and operates in a thoroughly modern way. But is Martin actually a vampire, or just a mentally ill serial killer whose superstitious family have convinced him of his vampiric nature over the years? That answer is left for us to decide as we follow Martin through his life; both as he awkwardly makes friends and starts an affair with a lonely housewife, and as he chooses, stalks and kills his victims - trying to decide what world he belongs in...

I showed this movie to Nick once, because he was a fan of vampire movies and enjoyed the more intellectual movies of the genre as well as the cheesy b-movies. Unfortunately, he didn't care for it at all, probably because the movie is admittedly quite slow-paced and ambiguous as to whether Martin is really a vampire or not. There's also very few "action" scenes in the film, aside from Martin's attacks on his victims - basically, Martin is a very atypical vampire movie. I know that's not going to be to everyone's tastes, but I personally really enjoy the way the film lets us come to our own conclusions as to whether Martin really is a supernatural creature who needs to drink blood to stay young and survive, or just a mentally disturbed young man who, after years of being told he is a vampire and abused (it's suggested that other family members have tried at least one exorcism on him in the past, and Tateh Cuda's treatment of him is definitely abusive), becomes the very thing he's being accused of.

Martin is quite an anti-religion movie, with its main character repeatedly pointing out that it's all superstition and magic, laughing at Cuda's attempts to keep him at bay with crucifixes and rosary beads and being utterly unmoved when Cuda brings in an elderly priest to perform an exorcism on him. Martin doesn't believe his vampirism is of a supernatural nature at all - he has no fangs, no power to compel women or people in general (something he complains about at one point, saying, "In real life, in real life you can't get people to do what you want them to do."), no ability to turn into a bat or mist. He has to use thoroughly modern lockpicks and sedatives to commit his crimes, and clean up very carefully after himself to avoid leaving any evidence. Interestingly though, Martin seems to have idealised images of what he wants to be happening when he is attacking his victims, where his female victims call to him and welcome his advances and bloodthirst. These imaginings, as well as what could be either flashbacks or delusions of an old-school mob, complete with pitchforks and torches, chasing him, are shot in black-and-white as opposed to colour, enhancing the otherworldly feel of them (Romero actually wanted the entire film to be in black-and-white but the producers objected, apparently having never seen what he did with black-and-white film ten years previously). Throughout the film, Martin always seems markedly out-of-place wherever he is - shy and awkward. Most of his attempts to reach out to people end badly or at least awkwardly, such as his calls to a late-night radio talk show where he becomes known as "The Count" and, while everyone is fascinated by his calls, he's still clearly seen as a figure of ridicule.

The disturbing aspects of Martin come not from the murders Martin commits to sate his bloodlust, but in the ideas that people could still think in such a way in the latter years of the 20th century (and onwards into the 21st, where you still hear of people - sadly often children - dying as the results of exorcisms or punishments for being a "witch" because of people twisting and taking religious belief to extremes). There are also people who believe themselves to be vampires as well - I've heard the term "moroii" being used to describe them - who feed off only willing "victims", taking either blood or psychic energy and never killing the ones they feed off. No doubt Tatah Cuda would have wanted to drive a stake through their hearts as well. Then again, the ambiguity of what type of vampire Martin is, and the way it is left completely up to the audience to decide, also adds a level of discomfort to the whole thing.

Martin was also the first film that George Romero and special effects artist Tom Savini worked on together (he has a supporting role in the film as well as providing the wrist-slicing effects). Interestingly, it was also one of the films seized and confiscated, but not prosecuted, under Section 3 of the UK's Obscene Publications Act during the video nasties panic of the early 1980s (probably because people were afraid that the film could influence others into killing people for their blood, just as Martin may have been influenced by years of abuse by superstitious family members...)

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Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter (1984)

Day 4, and it's time for Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter. Which, of course, turned out to be not the final chapter at all, but apparently at the time they really meant it. Even Tom Savini came back to do the makeup effects on this film, because he felt it was the only way to kill off Jason Voorhees for good.

So, the brief plot recap: The Final Chapter takes place directly after Part 3, meaning that events actually start on Sunday the 15th and carry on through to Tuesday the 17th. Everyone thinks Jason is dead after getting an axe buried in his skull at the end of Part 3, but he wakes up in the morgue and promptly sets about killing his way back to yet another part of Crystal Lake. This time he turns up at the Jarvis family residence, whose next-door neighbours just happen to be another group of teenagers looking to party and inevitably get killed. Also on the scene is one Rob Dyer, who's there to hunt Jason down once and for all. His sister Sandra was one of Jason's victims in Part 2 (she was one half of the couple speared to the bed) and so he's out for revenge.

There's actually a lot of plot to go around in The Final Chapter, probably because they were attempting to tie up as many of the loose ends and generally bring the series to a satisfactory conclusion (as they thought at the time). The character of Rob Dyer is one of those plot ends, brought in to remind us that this is really just the culmination of Jason Voorhees' long weekend of killing - although at the same time, his timing is rather flimsy: if his sister died on the Friday/Saturday, he wouldn't have found out until at least the Sunday (according to the films' own timeline) and yet in 24 hours he managed to get multiple newspaper clippings of Jason's rampages and pack a Jason-hunting kit (of course, he could have just had a family-avenging kit prepped and ready to go for just this sort of situation), and then get to Crystal Lake in time for the grand finale. Impressive stuff.

One can even look at Rob Dyer as a modern-day woodsman of sorts, there to slay the horrible monster and save Red Riding Hood/the surviving teens just in the nick of time. Except not only does he not manage that, he fails in perhaps the most spectacular fashion. Confronting his nemesis in a darkened basement, Rob falls very quickly to him, and all he can do is cry out, "Help! He's killing me. He's killing me." Hardly the all-conquering hero he believed himself to be. In the end it falls to Trish and Tommy Jarvis to finally put Jason down; Trish in the capacity of Final Girl and Tommy by way of some cunning psychology and makeup tricks (although the fact that Tommy was played by Corey Feldman might have clued you in to his probable survival).

Joseph Zito was the director on The Final Chapter, and he and Tom Savini had worked together before on the 1981 slasher Rosemary's Killer (aka The Prowler). It was in fact his work on that film that got him the role of director here, and while there were apparently some conflicts between Zito and the cast (due to the low budget, some of the cast had to perform potentially dangerous stunts themselves, which led to tension between them and the director at the very least) the finished product came out very well and was yet another hit at the box office. But of course, that success was a double-edged sword, as if the series was continuing to do so well, the studio executives were going to be loathe to just leave it like that...

 

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Friday the 13th Part 2 (1981)

Friday the 13th (1980)

Friday the 13th (1980)

Today is this blog's first birthday. Yes, even with the occasional fits and starts, we managed to keep this thing going for an entire year, which I think calls for some sort of celebration. And the celebration I've chosen is to review the entire Friday the 13th series, including the crossover with Freddy Kruger and the remake (that's 12 films, for those keeping count). So of course, the best place to start with this is right at the very beginning...

If you don't know the plot to Friday the 13th, then I'm not sure you're quite old enough for this blog. Regardless, here's a brief recap for you: Camp Crystal Lake is reopening for the first time in 30 or so years after a series of mysterious accidents, deaths and murders got it closed down in 1958. A new batch of camp counselors are staying there while working to put the final touches to the camp, but someone else is there as well, who does not want the camp to reopen, and the body count grows and grows...

Friday the 13th is really one of the "unholy trinity" of slasher movies (the other two being A Nightmare on Elm Street and Halloween, of course). As such, it contains many of the elements, tropes and cliches that we now expect in horror movies. There's the crazy local/hobo who warns the cast not to go to the camp or they'll all die; there's the annoying joker of the bunch who jumps out of cupboard with a fake knife in his head or pretends to drown and therefore is one of the first to die; the horny couple who sneak off to have illicit sex and get murdered, and the virginial (or at least not seen to have sex during the course of the film) final girl who is left to fight the killer alone. There's also Kevin Bacon, for those of you playing the "Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon" game at home. Tom Savini did the special makeup effects too, which was one of the reasons Friday the 13th did so well at the box office when it came out, and Sean S. Cunningham was the director (one of his previous works had been Last House on the Left in 1972 with Wes Craven). So it had quite the pedigree. But what exactly made Friday the 13th the success it was?

Well, a lot of it was timing. Friday the 13th came out just two years after Halloween, and was in some ways at last a copy of that film - a silent, unstoppable killer stalks and kills teenagers who are just out to party and enjoy themselves, until just one is left standing to fight the killer. But it is by no means a complete clone, obviously - it makes its own mark on the nascent slasher genre. Actually it left less of a mark and more of an indelible arrow pointing the way as to where much of the subgenre would go for the next decade or so. You might even say that it eclipsed the film it originally took its inspiration from - certainly Friday the 13th had more sequel power than Halloween, as well as a somewhat more coherent narrative as the films went on (undead lunkhead in a hockey mask versus the "Mark of Thorn", anyone?)

Of course, 34 years on it has aged terribly. Nowadays a film would have to jump through all manner of hoops to explain why none of the counselors had mobile phones, or why no-one investigated the earlier events, or even that things had gotten so bad there in the first place. But its special effects still hold up well, being disturbingly realistic and full of little touches that raise them above so many others (the air bubbles in a throat wound; the eye of one victim twitching in his death throes). It's 80s horror nostalgia, and this makes it still enjoyable all these years later. And the ending can still make you jump if you don't know it's coming (or, as happened to me once, if you've dozed off at an all-night horror movie marathon and woken up just at that point).

 

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The Burning (1981)

The Burning is one of the movies made in the aftermath of Friday the 13th that tried to cash in on that movie’s success. It even had Tom Savini doing the special effects, who turned down the chance to work on Friday the 13th Part 2 to work on this movie.

The plot is simplistic enough. Cropsy is the much-disliked caretaker of a summer camp where some of the residents decide to play a trick on him. They put a worm-ridden skull lit by candles in his bed to scare him, but of course it all goes horribly wrong and the bed and Cropsy end up in flames (this movie also illustrates how important it is to not keep your open gasoline cans next to your bed). He survives, miraculously, but is burned very much to a crisp and spends the next five years in hospital. When he gets out, after many failed skin grafts and being told to try not to resent the teens who were responsible for burning him alive, his first stop is to the red light district, where he picks up a lady and goes back to her place. When she catches a glimpse of his burnt face, however, she changes her mind, and so Cropsy grabs a handy pair of scissors and stabs her in the belly (the camera lingers on her flabby torso jiggling as he twists the scissors). After that and with a new purpose in mind and a pair of gardening shears in hand, Cropsy heads off to the old campground.

 At Camp Stonewater (which happens to be just across the lake from Camp Blackfoot, also known as Camp Cook the Caretaker), all the usual summer camp events are occurring - baseball games, geeks spying on girls in the showers, bullies beating up on geeks for spying on girls in the showers, and geeks shooting bullies in the rear with air rifles, to name a few. Camp misfit Alfred is having a particularly hard time fitting in, and so camp counselor Todd takes him under his wing, briefly referring to a time, five years previously, when he was sent home from camp for some reason... Meanwhile, Cropsy is sneaking round the camp, peering into windows, scaring campers and generally providing us with plenty of killer’s-eye view shots to build suspense.

The next day most of the camp sets off on camping trips, canoing down the river to where they’ll be staying, and of course Cropsy manages to track them there. That night Todd tells the campers the story of Cropsy around the campfire, complete with someone jumping out of the bushes at the end to scare everyone. That night Cropsy starts his culling of the teens - at first just picking off any who go off on their own for skinny dipping or some illicit teen sex, and eventually culimating in a massacre the next day on a raft, where fingers get snipped off, throats slashed and torsos punctured.

In the end it comes down to Cropsy versus Albert, with the former chasing the latter through the woods and into an abandoned mine before Todd appears on the scene and there's a final showdown, axe versus flamethrower, as well as a - shocking! - revelation that absolutely everyone probably saw coming. An epilogue leaves things open for the possibility of a sequel as well, with another set of campers telling the tale that we've just been watching.

As horror movies go, The Burning is decidedly mediocre. As an 80s slasher movie, it is even more so. Its main problem is that it just moves too slow. After the introduction and the murder of the prostitute at the start, we have to wait 40 minutes or so before the next death. Inbetween that time it’s all scenes of camp life, false scares and the occasional killer’s-eye view as Cropsy stalks through the woods in perfect silence. Of course, when the deaths do start happening they happen en masse and they’re almost disturbingly realistic, thanks to Tom Savini’s effects and, as mentioned earlier, they managed to get The Burning on the UK’s video nasties list - the two scenes of particular contention being the “Raft Massacre” and the murder of the prostitute at the start of the film. Admittedly, when Cropsy’s face is finally revealed in all its glory he looks more like he’s stepped off the set of The Thing than a burn victim; Savini has stated that this was because he only had three days to do Cropsy’s makeup.

The Burning does stand out from other slashers of its time for two reasons, however. One is that it has a Final Boy (in the form of Alfred) instead of the Final Girl that most slashers were choosing to go with at that time, including Friday the 13th, which of course has had an influence on this and other similar slashers of the time. It also stands out as being one of the first notable slashers of the time where the killer stuck with one notable weapon throughout the film - in this case his gardening shears, which he uses to great effect. Aside from those points, however, The Burning doesn’t really have the punch to rise above the many other slashers of that time, even with Savini’s work, and a lot of its fame today comes not from the film itself, but from the controversy it caused with its inclusion on the UK video nasties list and the MPAA having similar problems with the scenes of gore.

 

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Movie Review - Rosemary's Killer (1981)

Movie Review - Rosemary's Killer (1981)

Also known as The Prowler, Rosemary's Killer was the third film from director Joseph Zito and one of the earlier films to feature Tom Savini's supurb makeup special effects. It also had the misfortune to be released in the UK at around the same time as the "Video Nasties" scare, and while it was not so unlucky as to end up on the DPP's list of banned titles, it did end up on the "Section 3" list, which meant that it did occasionally get seized by over-zealous police officers and so its availability suffered for many years afterwards.

In 1946, a returning WW2 vet gets a Dear John letter from his sweetheart, telling him that she's left him for someone else. At Avalon Bay's graduation dance that same year, a stranger wearing WW2 fatigues and armed with a bayonet and a garden fork murders murders the girl and her new boyfriend, leaving a rose with her corpse. 35 years later and Avalon Bay is holding its first dance since those murders... which of course sets off that mysterious killer into going on another spree...

The biggest flaw of Rosemary's Killer is that the identity of the killer is far too obvious. The movie all but tells up outright within the first 20 minutes, so the only way it can really be a surprise when they are revealed at the end is if you weren't paying attention at the start. Still, the number of people who watch 80s slasher movies for the mystery and the chance to hone their detective skills isn't all that high, and so we will forgive them this flaw. Because - and let's be honest about this - most of us are watching this film for Savini's special makeup effects.

And they are supurb effects. A man takes a beyonet through the top of his skull, exiting under his chin. Heads explode. A woman gets impaled on a garden fork in the shower, and we're able to actually see the prongs embedded in the skin rather than having to use the camera to hide the prosthetic (Yes, I am a mark for Tom Savini, however did you guess?). In fact, Savini considers this to be his best work, and director Zito tells a story of talking with a security guard about the film and being asked "You really DID kill those people, right?" (Incidentally, it was this movie that got Zito his role as director for Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter, where he was reunited with Tom Savini.)

Lest you think I've gone completely bloodthirsty, however, let's look at some of the other points of Rosemary's Killer. The suspense and tension are good (despite the killer's identity being so obvious) because you never know who is going to fall victim to him next, and the film does throw up sufficient red herrings to keep the characters at least guessing as to the identity of the killer. On the other hand, it's also a movie based very much around its gruesome setpieces, and so inbetween them you can find yourself watching overlong scenes of people wandering through dark houses or deserted roads while tense mood music plays, intercut with the occasional shot of the killer dressed head-to-toe in camo gear. Several of the cast chew very enthusiastically on the scenery and develop some serious cases of plot-convenience blindness when necessary. The plot is thin on the ground, but then again, what 80s slasher did have an abundance of plot? It's also obviously taking some of its cues from other slashers of the same time period, most notably Friday the 13th and Halloween.

Overall, Rosemary's Killer is one of the better slasher movies to come out of the time period straight after Halloween and Friday the 13th, and it's a shame that it has been overlooked all these years for various reasons. It's certainly worth getting hold of a copy to watch, perhaps even moreso than other, "bigger" slashers of around the same time period.

 

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