Bloody Bloody Bible Camp (2012)

Directed by: Vito Trabucco
Run Time:  90 Minutes

This movie was being advertised on Twitter and like forty percent of the weirdness on that service it of course was brought to my attention. So I checked out the trailer, carried out the hunt for a retailer that had it and shipped to Canada, and once I owned it I promptly forgot about it. Which really was a disservice to this film as it is a fun, crude, and completely insane.

The story starts in 1977 at Happy Day Bible Camp. A vague denominational Christian bible camp in the middle of nowhere USA. The campers and staff are engaged in the sort of things you would expect people in a Christian bible camp to be doing. Mostly sex, drugs, and referencing events that happened in 1977. Like the death of Elvis Presley or commenting about how horrible a certain space opera movie that opened earlier that year. This film is a slasher film, so the nostalgia for the seventies gives way to random bloody murder of everybody except for two people. The added bonus is the killer is dressed up as a nun with a devil mask.

The plot then skips ahead seven years to 1984. Another vague Christian denomination group is test camping at Happy Day Bible Camp to see if it's worth buying. Leading this collection of misfits and dead people walking is one Father Reggie (Reggie Bannister). Sadly this is the point where the script starts to drag because of the who's the killer shell game, crude jokes, and setting up the victims for their slaughter. The jokes are funny and the set up for the third act blood bath is needed but the whole pace of the film just stops.

Eventually the movie crawls to the third act. The murderous nun in the devils mask makes her reappearance and the campers and staff start dropping in amusing fashion. The movie also shifts in tone from tongue in cheek tone to full on camp mockery of the slasher genre. To highlight this, the first person killed is decapitated with great practical effects whereas later the nun kills a girl with a crucifix and penetrating a notorious body cavity. Ron Jeremy makes an amusing and blasphemous cameo.

Overall this is a fun and weird movie. It's a love letter to slasher movies from the seventies and eighties but it is not afraid to make fun of those movies as well. The movie falls down when it come to it's characters and it's pace. The characters are stereotypical cardboard cutouts for comedic purposes most of the time. Like the ditzy girl with nudity in her contract, the dumb fat guy, a few variations on the jock stereotype. Not all the characters are like this but there are enough of them that it does distract from the movie. The pacing issues seem to stem from padding so the movie can get a ninety minute run time.

This is a sold rental and or streaming film for fans of raunchy humor. Also a great film to show at your party for coming out as an atheist.

MVT: Ron Jeremy's cameo. I know it's dickish to not talk about why but it is a spoiler. The spoiler free version is the man can act and is funny, especially in this role.

Make or Break: It's a minor and petty break. But I really would have like Father Reggie to have pulled out a four barreled shot gun.

Score: 5.15 out of 10

Don't Panic (1988)

I honestly have no idea why Ruben Galindo Jr’s film is titled Don’t Panic (aka Dimensiones Ocultas, which sounds suspiciously more accurate to me) outside of the fact that it’s also the title of the steadfastly Eighties song sung by the film’s lead, Jon Michael Bischof.  When Michael’s (Bischof) jerkwad pals show up after his seventeenth birthday party is already over, he panics.  His drunk mother might hear them.  When his helmet-haired bestie Tony (Juan Ignacio Aranda) starts playing with the Ouija board that he and the rest of the gang gifted to Michael, he panics.  Don’t they believe in the Devil?!  When Michael starts having visions of a demonic killer picking off his buddies and his eyes turn red (not bloodshot, but red), he panics.  That last one, at least, I can understand.

It can certainly be argued that just about any (if not every) film involving teenagers being either stalked by monsters/slashers or turning into monsters/slashers is actually a film dealing with sexual frustration/awakening (I suppose the argument could be made to encompass all films involving teens, period).  Don’t Panic is no different.  Michael, we are lead to believe, is a virgin.  He has a “golly gee” sense of puppy love, and this is directed toward Alexandra (Gabriela Hassel).  The two play hooky from school and enjoy a light, pleasant dating montage that’s as syrupy as it is superficial.  Alexandra is also a virgin, but she seems to handle it better than Michael (even though she expresses her vast love for him after knowing him for one day).  Michael is coded as so nascently pubescent (despite his actual age), he wears children’s pajamas (they have little, colorful dinosaurs on them; everything but the footies), he doesn’t bat an eye about wearing them out in public, and strangest of all, no one ever comments on this.  He has no car, riding a bike everywhere.  He gives Alexandra a “Magic Rose” that will never wither “as long as love exists between [the] two.”  Michael is a child doing childish things, and the concept of love in this film is just as simplistic.  Pretty in Pink this ain’t.  

All of Michael’s sexual frustrations start after messing with the Ouija board, which is also the night he is introduced to Alexandra.  Many times, his visions happen at night when he’s sleeping, and they typically end with him springing out of bed, a reference to the dreaded wet dreams of teenaged boys everywhere (with blood being dripped on his face, a substitute for ejaculate).  The blood red eyes that he gets at the most inopportune times is the equivalent of the erections boys get when sitting in class, idly considering sex with all of the women in their lives, or bouncing around on just the right seat on the school bus (or, let’s be honest, for absolutely no reason at all other than for their dicks to make them aware that they’re awake and have had a full pot of coffee).  The visions of Virgil (did I forget to mention that, according to this film, the Devil uses the alias of Virgil?) slaying other young teens (with a giant dagger; get it?) is the peristaltic contraction of Michael’s sexual vexation.  Even after Michael and Alexandra have sex, Michael can’t deal with the relationship maturely, because the whole of his being is subsumed by hormones, and the killings and visions continue.  He has a hard time even facing Alexandra, perhaps embarrassed by the intimacy they shared.  Michael’s maturity (or what maturity this film will allow any of its characters to attain) is shown in a scene where he throws his toys around his room and tears down the car posters from his walls (the act itself is still immature, however; it’s the realization that maturity needs to happen, whether Michael likes it or not).  Virgil continues to stalk Michael and his friends, an omnipresent avatar of the sexual spark that has been ignited in Michael, one over which he still has no control.

Similarly, Virgil is a metaphor for the domestic stress in Michael’s life.  His mother is an alcoholic.  We assume that this addiction kicked in after her husband left her or was part of the reason why he did.  Michael’s dad is absent from his life, sending money on occasion, never having time to see his son.  Naturally, these are the things Michael’s folks argue about whenever they speak.  In this sense, the murders are a means for Michael to vent about the tensions at home.  Note that Virgil doesn’t stalk adults, because they hold authority over Michael.  His targeted victims are Michael’s peers, a means of becoming king of the heap, as it were, to mirror the beastliness of the adults in Michael’s life and gain control over some aspect of his life.  In other words, to become an adult.  This also ties in with Michael’s sense of sexual frustration, because his mother is the only woman he has had in his life for some time.  She saunters around the house in silky robes and negligees, constantly trying to touch and comfort him, while still convinced he’s going crazy.  Since sex with his mother would be transgressive, Virgil gives Michael an equally satisfying (and somehow less transgressive) outlet for the Oedipal feelings he may be harboring.

Let me be clear; this film is a mess.  Its story is as vanilla as a bean, the characters are, by turns, stultifyingly bland and obnoxious, and the effects work floats along at about sea level.  And yet, there is an otherworldly dementia at play that makes it kind of enjoyable.  This is the sort of cinematic world where a character stops to buy smokes while he’s supposed to be sitting watch over an intended victim, where a character thinks that a Ouija board is THE FUNNIEST THING EVER, where a character shoots up his girlfriend’s house after being the most dreadful, uninvited dinner guest in the history of cinema (and that’s okay in the end).  The film can’t really decide if it wants to be more of a domestic melodrama or a supernatural slasher (and in either capacity it’s a fairly rote, drab affair), so it splits the difference and gifts the audience with these surreal bits and character traits.  It’s essential viewing in the same way that P.T. Barnum’s “Feejee Mermaid” is: you don’t believe a lick of it, but you’re drawn in by its horrific mishmash of oddball pieces.

MVT:  Michael’s petulant man-child persona is truly one for the ages.

Make or Break:  The opening birthday/post-birthday party sequence cements the full flavor of this particular dish: simultaneously mundane and arch.

Score: 6.5/10 

Fatal Games (1984)

The students at the Falcon Academy of Athletics in Massachusetts strive their little hearts out to be the very best in their chosen disciplines.  However, once they all make it to “The Nationals” (because, hey, they’re each the very best in their chosen disciplines), they start dropping like flies when a mad javelin thrower starts picking them off, one by one.

So, that’s basically Michael Elliott’s Fatal Games (aka Olympic Nightmare aka The Killing Touch), and it’s a film about drive and obsession.  The kids in the film are compelled to push themselves further every day, and while they don’t choose the augmentation of their regimens, they go along with it to the point that they become taken over by the desires of the adults in their lives.  The students begin to reflect the “winning is everything” mentality of guys like Coach Webber (Christopher Mankiewicz).  Before they made “The Nationals,” the kids behaved like just that: kids.  At the celebration dinner which opens the film, the students surreptitiously throw food at each other, and wind up playing tug of war with the tablecloth while some moneyed windbag drones on about how proud of them he is.  After this celebration, the kids become much more focused on exceeding their limits.  For example, Nancy (Melissa Prophet) turns down an offer to go out and party in order to pump iron.  Joe (Nicholas Love), also turns them down, at least in part because he is essentially a self-loathing rage-o-holic, and the film allows us to believe that he became this way through his compulsion to do better at javelin tossing.  He remains out on the field, throwing pointed sticks and visibly berating himself for his deficiencies.  Even Frank (Michael O’Leary), the class quasi-clown, develops this neurosis.  After injuring his leg, he tells the others to keep practicing in a scene reminiscent of the classic, clichéd War film scenario where the injured soldier implores his brothers-in-arms to “go on without me.”  The yearning to be number one is toxic for these young adults, something which rings very true, considering that there are far too many real life stories of this ilk out there.

Likewise, in the quest for physical/athletic perfection, there is the notion of “the dream” (as in “living…”).  That said, these dreams appear more than anything else to be those of the adults who live vicariously through the kids who may achieve the goals they themselves couldn’t reach.  Coach Webber is the Type A guy who barks at the students for their flaws and then comforts them quickly afterward, like a pimp working one of his girls.  In private, he pisses and moans about “the kids today” lacking the passion that they had back when he was a little nipper, et cetera, et cetera.  Dr. Jordine (played by the director) essentially believes in juicing in order “to push [the students’] athletic potential to their limits.”  The kids gather for their regularly scheduled medical appointments to not only get check-ups but also to receive their new experimental drug diets (is it any wonder, then, that Joe is so tense?).  Sweet girl-next-door Annie (Lynn Banashek) is put on drugs in order to stop her breasts from growing.  They physically retard a natural process for the sake of gymnastics, but she goes along with it because adults know best, and she wants to make them happy.  And while Nurse Diane (Sally Kirkland) voices her disapproval (kind of quietly, all things considered) of Jordine’s approach, she goes along with it, as well.  Phil’s (Sean Masterson) dad gets Phil a tryout with a professional baseball club (Phil is a Track and Field guy).  This isn’t about Phil’s dream to play for the Yankees or any other team.  It’s about his father’s desire to fit Phil into the mold he has carved out for his son.  The adults in Fatal Games are, it could be argued, more dangerous to the kids than the mad javelin chucker.  At least with a javelin through your torso, it’s all over; you’re dead.  It’s the long, slow, painful process of the adults eroding these youths’ wills and self-esteem that is infinitely more damaging than the killer.

To call this a Slasher film is a bit misleading.  Yes, there is an unknown killer taking out the students in mildly interesting sequences.  Yes, there is a final girl who refuses to have sex with her beau before marriage (after going over to his place, he does push-ups, which is funny since, one, it reinforces the idea that these youngsters are more obsessed with their physiques than with the normal drives of young adults, and two, he seems perfectly okay with not getting laid even though that was the whole point of his relentless push to get this girl over to his pad [I would argue this ties in with the first point, as well]).  Yes, there is a deep red herring, who you know isn’t the killer because that would be entirely too obvious (go on and guess who it is).  Yes, everyone in this film wanders around dark buildings without even thinking of turning on a fucking light, positively begging to get speared.  Yes, it has characters too stupid to call the police when students go missing.  Yes, it has a climactic reveal as dumb and confusing as it is intriguing.  But the kills are almost afterthoughts in this film.  They just pop up every now and then in order to fill their quota and then go away.  The film is much more interested in the lives of the kids and the abusive, masochistic relationship they have with the adults in their lives.  But even this plays like flat, bad soap opera-esque melodrama.  It’s all superficial character sketches and attempts at tension in order to build sympathy for the victims which, sadly, just don’t work.  The film plays largely like an episode of Kids, Incorporated in terms of how these are rote scenarios for rote characters in between mini-set pieces that still don’t fully satisfy as they should, because, with the exception of one, the kill scenes are filmed in the most unimaginative ways possible.  The filmmakers also could have improved Fatal Games greatly with a stronger commitment to the story they were telling and developing their characters beyond being merely snapshots from a high school yearbook.  Fatal Games is a film that should have profited (ironically) from the boundary-pushing attitude of its characters.  It just doesn’t have the Eye of the Tiger.

MVT:  The primary conceit of the destructive influence of adults and the cult of physique/perfection on young athletes is a rich vein to mine.  The film only digs down a few inches, unfortunately.

Make or Break:  The swimming pool scene is actually pretty good, and is even vaguely reminiscent of the “white bathing suit” scene from The Creature from the Black Lagoon.  None of the film’s remainder lives up to this.

Score:  4/10     

Mortuary (1983)

When I think of Christopher George, I think of two films.  First and foremost is William Girdler’s fantastic “JAWS with claws” Nature Amok film Grizzly.  I cannot count the number of times I watched this film on Channel 16’s Million Dollar Movie.  It stands up just as well for me today, and having at long last seen it uncut, I was actually surprised at the level of some of the violence.  The other film is also from Girdler and also a Nature Amok film: Day of the Animals.  Everyone remembers this one for a stripped-to-the-waist Leslie Nielsen wrestling a bear (maybe the brother of the antagonist from Grizzly? in revenge mode).  I remember it more for George and Richard Jaeckel surviving against a world gone insane.  But what I remember most of all is that George’s character in Grizzly is named Kelly.  This is his surname, but everyone always refers to him as Kelly throughout the film, and for some reason, this stuck with me to the point that I was under the mistaken impression that George always played characters named Kelly.  This thinking lasted for many years.  Combine this with the name of a police officer named Kelly in Larry Hagman’s (yes, THAT Larry Hagman) Beware! The Blob, and I begin to find that I simply like male characters with that name, be it their proper name or their surname.  I have no idea why.  Having said this, George’s character in Howard Avedis’ Mortuary (aka Embalmed) is named Harry Andrews, but that wasn’t nearly so disappointing to me as the film on the whole.  

Christie’s (Mary McDonough) dad is beaten with a baseball bat and knocked into the family pool to drown one fine, sunny day.  Next thing you know, two stunads, Josh (Dennis Mandel) and Greg (David Wallace), are sneaking into Mr. Andrews’ warehouse to steal some tires.  Josh gets offed with an embalming needle, and Greg flees the scene.  Quickly thereafter, some creep (whose identity is about as secret as the recipe for ice) in white face paint a la The Exorcist’s Pazuzu (and I like to think The Embalmer is the inspiration for Brain Guy’s look on Mystery Science Theater 3000, though honestly I believe the “vampires” in The Omega Man would be closer to the mark [I have substantiated none of this]) runs around threatening Christie and slaying seemingly random characters.

What stands out the most to me in Mortuary is the idea of what lies beneath the façade of bourgeois normalcy, what lurks behind all the white picket fences of the middle class.  Andrews has séances in his mortuary and warehouse.  These are some of the oddest séances I’ve ever seen, since the first one we see is just a bunch of women in diaphanous capes swishing and dancing in a circle, while George simply stands there waiting for his SAG check to clear.  Later, one is depicted a little more traditionally, with a moving table, questions answered from the beyond, and so forth.  These aren’t witches or Satanists, though they bear the hallmarks of those, and this isn’t something that any of the characters does out in the open or will admit to in public.  It’s still given a dim view by society and so must be kept secreted in the shadows.  

Andrews’ son Paul (Bill Paxton) is the epitome of yuppie mediocrity at first glance.  When we’re introduced to him, he’s dressed in a shirt and tie with a brown sweater over top.  He’s excited (or as excited as one can be) that he just bought a Mozart album that he wants to share with Christie.  This is expressed in the same way that comic book fans gush about their favorite titles to non-comic book fans, and it garners about the same level of polite disinterest.  It isn’t until we discover that Paul is Andrews’ son and works at the mortuary that we are given the impression that he’s not as normal as he looks.  This isn’t to say that there’s anything distasteful about the mortuary sciences, of course.  It’s a combination of two things that puts an audience ill at ease.  First, most of us aren’t privy to the details of these services in our normal lives, and we have been trained by society that there is a certain dignity in death that the realities of embalming a cadaver demystifies.  Second, is the casualness with which morticians ply their trade.  Greg is summoned into the embalming room by Paul, where a naked woman is prepared for embalming.  While Greg is ostensibly a little in awe of this (you can’t really tell from his acting), for Paul this is as normal as breathing.  

Christie’s mom Eve (Lynda Day George) puts on a nice exterior, but she is a participant in Mr. Andrews’ extracurricular activities.  Further, she and Christie have a tense relationship centering on the death of the family patriarch and Christie’s recent sleepwalking sojourns.  Christie believes that her mom is trying to drive her insane or maybe just get rid of her so she can move on with another man.  The film attempts to strip away the veneer of the typical suburban family, sadly not exposing tons when you think about it at length, but it is in there.

Another aspect the film deals with is the act of grieving.  The two families at the heart of this film have recently had losses.  Christie’s dad was murdered, though it was ruled an accident.  Christie and Eve deal with it in their separate ways.  Eve attends séances to contact her husband’s spirit and find closure.  She believes his death was accidental, so the answers she receives in these sessions are enough to bring her peace.  Christie knows that her father’s death was intentional, but since she doesn’t know who did it or why, her internalization of this quandary leads to her sleepwalking habits which are potentially dangerous (once she winds up in the pool, another time hovering by the front door with a knife in her hand).  Mr. Andrews also recently lost his wife to suicide.  We can assume that this is why he started his little séance group in the first place, though he seems a little bit too into it for it to be a casual attempt to find solace, and for all we know this could all be a scam.  This leads us to Paul, who behaves as if everything is same old, same old, despite his mom’s recent, tragic passing.  He goes about his day as if nothing has changed, and this is just as unhealthy in the long run as Christie’s somnambulism.  Interestingly, it’s the adults, in their arguably excessive, unconventional, and likely misguided activities, who deal the most healthily with the realities of the death of a loved one.

So why, then, is this movie such a dog?  I maintain that the answer to the question lies within applying the same primary query to some specific examples.  Why does Greg make a medium-level to do about Josh going missing and then never bring up the disappearance of his friend again?  Why does Christie wear makeup to bed?  Why are there more jump scares in this film than there were bodily fluid stains at Plato’s Retreat?  Why did the filmmakers focus on these cheap frights rather than playing on the dread and innate creepiness of the story’s titular location and its goings on?  Why, when Christie wants to take a break from Greg, does he not only not get emotional but also acts pretty fucking chipper when he sees Eve on his way out the door?  Why are we introduced to a trio of Greg and Christie’s pals (including the requisite “funny fat guy” character) at a rollerskating rink if none of them contributes a single thing to the story, even as potential victims?  Why does a mortuary stock sedatives?  Aren’t all their clientele already free from all bodily pain?  Why doesn’t The Embalmer kill Greg when he has the drop on him?  You can dismiss any of these as stylistic flourishes, and they may, in fact, be the reason you happen to enjoy this film.  Nevertheless, it’s the level of apathy threading its way through all of these exemplars that just kills it for me.  There is no point to any of this outside of the big “surprise” ending which isn’t a surprise to anyone over the age of ten who has ever seen a movie before.  The lackadaisical approach deflates any tension and derails any compulsion to find out where the narrative (and its uninteresting characters) is going, because it isn’t going anywhere.  The big question I had after watching Mortuary was why couldn’t it stay buried?  

MVT:  The film was made in the Eighties, so at least you get some nice snapshots of that time (the roller rink being the one that stands out in my mind; funny, since the scenes set in it are utterly pointless).

Make or Break:  The idiotic noncommittal of Greg to tracking down Josh, who we suppose is his best friend, and the film’s dropping of this plot point “just because” is the clearest indication I can think of as to why no one should commit the ninety minutes to watch this thing.

Score:  4/10