Sampling dialogue from film and TV was a staple of 90s electro/industrial bands. As I was (still am) an avid listener of that genre, there are a number of line readings and deliveries I’ve heard hundreds if not thousands of times without ever been aware of the source material.
That’s why when I’m watching a horror or exploitation film, I’m always delighted when my ears perk up at a familiar line recitation. I finally have true context for the sample and a tiny unsolved mystery from my youth has been solved.
This month was the first time I’d seen THE EXORCIST III — despite the fact that I own it — and I was lucky enough to see a print of it with a packed crowd.
Yes, THE EXORCIST III is skillfully plotted with expertly crafted scares and angles and production design. Yes, it has one of the all-time classic jump scares.
However, what resonated most was hearing George C. Scott’s perfectly paced declaration of beliefs, a declaration I heard many, many times in FRONT LINE ASSEMBLY’s ‘Bio-Mechanic’:
“I believe in disease. I believe in pain… cruelty and infidelity!”
Obviously, with such a memorable, dialogue-driven film, it has been endlessly sampled by other bands such gabber act DELTA 9 and the fittingly named XORCIST. However, it’s Front Line Assembly’s use that has echoed in my head for years, and I organically stumbled upon it on my own.
If it weren’t for the fact that PROM NIGHT featured a post-HALLOWEEN Jamie Lee Curtis, I highly doubt it’d be remembered much at all today. While it’s a serviceable slasher and does what it says on the tin — a whole bunch of students are stalked and killed in their high school on prom night — it does get lost a bit in the deluge of 1980s slashers.
Now, HELLO MARY LOU: PROM NIGHT II? There’s a film that stands out!
I’ll grant you: HELLO MARY LOU was never slated to be a PROM NIGHT sequel, but it featured a prom queen and murder so the studio appended PROM NIGHT II to the title and that was that.
Unlike PROM NIGHT, HELLO MARY LOU is far more supernatural, focused on the death of a 50s prom queen who, let loose in suburban 1987, inhabits bodies to reclaim her crown by any means necessary.
The result is smart and silly, and has inventively surreal set-pieces that rack up the bodies. Oh, and Michael Ironside is a priest! That’s worth the price of admission alone.
HELLO MARY LOU was followed by PROM NIGHT III, which veers into full supernatural slapstick, but I’ve already featured it! Find a copy of both any way that you can!
If you’re in Chicago on October 18th, 2024? HELLO MARY LOU is playing at the Music Box Theatre and features writer Ron Oliver! It promises to be a night to remember!
French arthouse director Claire Denis’s TROUBLE EVERY DAY is a difficult film to classify, to the point where some misguided souls would argue that it’s not a horror film at all. It is enigmatically subdued but violent. Overt and obtuse. Visually lyrical and strikingly blunt to the eyes. Thick with lust and rarely erotic. Alludes to vampirism but is grounded by human faults.
It’s about feeding bloody need, addiction, restriction, seeking and rejecting assistance, and all of the baggage that comes with all of the above.
It is also a highly unpleasant 101 minutes long that culminates in an act that is incredibly difficult to watch. So much so that more than a handful of folks walked out of the screening I attended.
It is considered part of the New French Extremity for a reason. (Also, it does feature INSIDE’s very feral Béatrice Dalle.)
It’s a film that kept stealing my attention for well over a week, its provocations and intent seeping into me, questions and speculations bubbling out. That may seem overwrought and pretentious, but Denis elicited that from me.
SISSY, from writer/directors Hannah Barlow and Kane Senes, is a vivid horror subversion of the ‘reuniting with childhood friends’ genre. Cecilia, a.k.a. Sissy (THE BOLD TYPE’s Aisha Dee) is a self-care influencer who displays the veneer of a calm, crisp, clean and put-together 20-something, but instead lives for the glow of her phone while falling asleep eating day-old room temperature pizza.
While out-and-about, Cecilia runs into estranged childhood best friend Emma (Hannah Barlow) and the two quickly reconnect. Emma invites Sissy to her very queer bachelorette party in a posh vacation home nestled in Australian woodland. Unbeknown to Cecilia, her childhood nemesis Alex is hosting said hen party. Tensions build, matters escalate, bonds and bones are broken and blood is spilled.
I’ll refrain from saying much more as it’s a wild ride, and best to only know the above. That won’t keep me for noting that, visually, SISSY is yet another in a line of refreshingly vibrant and colorful horror films. A large chunk of the film takes place in daylight, when the sun falls the frame is peppered with pastel neon glows. That may seem antithetical to a woodland-based horror/thriller, but it works.
There are also a number of small little grace notes that I love. One of the party members pouring a glass of a wine from a carafe and — without any sense of shame or self-consciousness — licks the trailing remainder from the lip of the carafe! There’s a playful nod towards slashers and face masks!
Lastly, I’ll note that SISSY was Autostraddle’s Queer Horrorscope Film pick for Cancers, so apparently I was pre-ordained to watch it this month. Perhaps a gripping tale about self-justifying self-destructive self-delusion isn’t exactly the kind of messaging one wants to hear from their filmic horrorscope, but it is very on-brand.
Classic Troma films are cheap and fun gross-out affairs by misfits, for misfits, and CLASS OF NUKE ‘EM HIGH is no exception.
The premise is paper thin: Tromaville High School — a typical 80s high school with jocks and nerds and a clutch of cartoonishly costumed gang members named ‘The Cretins’ — is situated next to a nuclear facility.
An accident occurs at the plant and nuclear waste spills into high school. Mutations ensue! An atomic baby-monster is birthed! The Cretins graduate from traditional bullying, drug dealing and deviant behavior to ultra-violent and psychotic behavior! Boyfriend and girlfriend Warren and Chrissy try to survive! Students cheer the shutdown of the school!
It’s a wild time, featuring all of the colorful camp and good-natured buckets of bodily fluids that you’d expect from Lloyd Kaufman’s scrappy DYI studio that brought you THE TOXIC AVENGER.
The Cretins are ostensibly the film’s villains as it’s the nuclear weed that they peddle that is the catalyst for the film’s mayhem, they punch down literally and figuratively, and their makeup and costumes are garish at best and culturally offensive at worse. However, they’re also a warm representation of smart-but-willful societal dropouts.
See, before they were The Cretins they were Tromaville High’s honor students. Now? Now they’re a whirlwind of disrespectful and abnormal behavior with no tolerance for conventional norms, ready to upend the system in every way they can. Body paint, fetish gear, severe piercings and gender fuckery! They’re society’s gremlins and damn proud of it!
I will note that the reason why these honor students became The Cretins is somewhat unclear. I like to think of them as having voluntarily checked out of normative culture and into fringe subcultures, much like myself as a teen.
Do they commit terrible acts, acts that damn them to gruesome deaths? Yeah, sure. Do we still root for them? Well, I certainly took glee in doing so. That’s because, well, at heart? I’m a dirtbag cretin.
Does SLUMBER PARTY MASSACRE II feature a slumber party?
Yes.
Does SLUMBER PARTY MASSACRE II feature the Driller Killer?
Yes.
There you go. It has all of the hallmarks of a slasher sequel. Except…
SLUMBER PARTY MASSACRE II’s Courtney is played by WINGS’s Crystal Bernard instead of Jennifer Meyers.
The slumber party isn’t as much a suburban high school slumber party but an all-women band and their boyfriends squatting in an under-construction housing lot.
…and the Driller Killer isn’t some brutish escaped mass murderer but a maniacal doo-wop singer who brandishes an outlandish guitar fused with the first film’s comically large drill. He’s what you might get if you took MAD MAX: FURY ROAD’s Doof Warrior and dropped him into GREASE.
The end result is a dream-logic slasher/musical that does not take itself seriously. It’s vibrant and inventive and a lot of fun, especially if you simply let it wash over you.
To those in the goth community, Elvira — a.k.a. Cassandra Petersen — is a living legend as a not just a TV horror film host, but also as a singular personality. (Unfortunately, her predecessor Maila Nurmi was not a fan.) A lot of folks believe being goth is all doom and gloom and feeling sad for themselves and the world and, while that’s part of the subculture, there’s a lot of whimsy and a fuckton of self-awareness and comfort with one’s body and sexuality.
In other words: Elvira knows who she is, what she wants, she doesn’t feel the need to filter herself and, as a result, she’s completely content with being brazen and someone who unapologetically revels in the darker facets of humanity, while also leaning into her love for vaudeville humor.
“Oh, fragility. Thy name is woman.”
While you might think that ELVIRA’S HAUNTED HILLS is a sequel to her cult film ELVIRA: MISTRESS OF THE DARK, it most certainly is not. It takes place in 1851 and riffs on a lot of traditional gothic works — there’s a lot of DRACULA here — but more than anything it’s a love letter to Roger Corman’s very loosely adapted films based on Edgar Allen Poe stories.
“That’s really weird. Cross-dressers are usually great dancers.”
(I’ll note that Lord Vladimere Hellsubus is portrayed by the one and only Richard O’Brien, best known for THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW’s Riff Raff.)
During the sixties, Corman warped a number of Poe works into films, including his version of THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF USHER, THE RAVEN, and THE PIT AND THE PENDULUM, all of which ELVIRA’S HAUNTED HILLS riffs on, even down to mimicking the production design of Corman’s THE PIT AND THE PENDULUM.
While ELVIRA’S HAUNTED HILLS leans quite a bit on Corman’s works, it’s still singularly hers. It’s brazenly cartoonish, and she’s certainly the star. From her making the most of her cleavage to also being the smartest and funniest person in the room, she’s also not even close to shy. This is best exemplified by her repeated attempts to woo Adrian, Gabi Andronache recreating a vapid Fabio, all shoulder-length brunette curls and buff chest.
“Adrian! You came too late! …again.”
Additionally, she gets her own CABARET-esque musical number which ends with her brandishing underwear that literally begs for applause.
Even if you aren’t part of the goth community, this is one hell of a lark, one that is very self-aware and doesn’t take itself seriously but is also very smart and knowing. I do wish she’d been able to turn out yearly films because she’s so fun and charismatic while also being an absolute misfit and we need more of that in the world. However, I’m thankful we can watch the few films that she willed into the world.
I’ve been a bit burned out due some of the intensity of the drafts I’ve been working on so, since OPPENHEIMER was just released, I thought I’d call your attention to my 2020 post regarding MANHATTAN, the little-known series from WGN America who very briefly broadcast a number of critical acclaimed prestige shows, including UNDERGROUND as well as MANHATTAN.
MANHATTAN tells the tale of the nucleus of the creation of the atom bomb and the environment and folks it took to construct it. Essentially: OPPENHEIMER before OPPENHEIMER.
MANHATTAN featured an embarrassment of creative riches, including an astounding cast and writers, such as Rachel Brosnahan (THE MARVELOUS MRS. MAISEL), Harry Lloyd (DOCTOR WHO, GAME OF THRONES), Olivia Williams (RUSHMORE), as well as writer Lila Byock who has since gone on to work on amazing serialized works such as THE LEFTOVERS and WATCHMEN and CASTLE ROCK.
It’s a shame that the show never garnered the attention it deserved, but WGN America gave us two seasons, which is one more than I thought we’d ever get.
While my initial write-up is several years old, it’s still available on a number of the streaming services listed, and both seasons are available on DVD.
“While passing through a vacation resort, a newlywed couple encounters a mysterious, strikingly beautiful countess and her aide.”
A stylish, surreal cult queer vampire film, featuring the brilliant Delphine Seyrig. Very giallo, prioritizing sensation over plot, like most quality vampire films.
(AMC+/hoopla/kanopy/peacock/tubi/etc.) TRIANGLE is a sort of THE PHILADELPHIA EXPERIMENT meets TIMECRIMES horror-thriller that’s tautly and expertly woven by SEVERANCE (2006) writer/director Christopher Smith. It features Melissa George (best known by me via her time on ALIAS but she was also a lead in 30 DAYS OF NIGHT), and really, that’s all you need to know.
![MANHATTAN (2014-2015) [RERUN]](https://mediaclature.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/manhattan.jpg)
