fun way to spend 93 minutes. Heck, Moseley even calls someone a “dog dick,” and that never gets old. So, is it a bad idea to mock a vitriolic spirit with a box of tampons? Always.


TAL ZIMERMAN ’89 PROBLEMS


BLOOD JUNKIE Starring Nick Sommer, Emily Treolo and Mike Johnson


Written and directed by Drew Rosas Troma


Blood Night: The Legend of Mary Hatchet: Shear terror.


view, Emmett recounts, in uncanny detail, the story of the notorious killer and the gruesome fate of his last victims. Emmett isn’t the first person that Maria manages to


interview on the topic of serial killers. In fact, Cyrus’ story is intercut with footage of academics and con- victed murderers alike, all speaking to the finitudes of serial killin’ – a directorial move that adds a sense of realism to the film, which is amplified by its no-frills cinematography. The interviews also provide some depth to Cyrus (why does a serial killer kill?); it’s prof- fered in the fantastic narration of Henriksen’s Emmett, but lacking from Krause’s somewhat superficial per- formance. The final “twist” can be seen coming a mile away (a bare-bones synopsis damn near spoils it), but it nonetheless al- lows Vadik to accomplish some- thing slightly original with his serial killer film. As has become tradition, the


“based on true events” label is applied loosely here. More likely, it seems that the screenplay was concocted after the systematic blending and recycling of a hand- ful of better “true life” serial killer flicks –with the addition of that aforementioned twist. Held together by fantastic performances from Henrik- sen and Harris, Cyrus is a largely forgettable – but not entirely regrettable.


DENVER WILSON PERIOD FILM BLOOD NIGHT:


THE LEGEND OF MARY HATCHET Starring Danielle Harris, Bill Moseley and Nate Dushku Directed by Frank Sabatella Written By Elke Blasi and Frank Sabatella Lionsgate


Here’s some advice: if ever you get the urge to buy tampons, dunk them in stage blood and litter


RM 40 C I N E M A C A B R E


them on the site of a historic murder that spawned a local leg- end, wait until a few days after the an- niversary of the crime. That way, you can avoid the vengeful ghost who will chop you and your friends to bits with an axe. Or an icepick. Or scissors. The characters in Frank Sabatella’s Blood Night apply no such logic, and pay dearly for it. The film begins with twelve-year-old Mary stab-


bing her mother’s eyes out with a pair of scissors in a scene that’s lit like a giallo, oozes like an H.G. Lewis flick and shimmies like a music video. A number of years later, we catch up with Mary in her new digs at the local sanatorium, where she’s raped and impregnated by a sleazy orderly. After losing her child at birth, she messily cleanses the hospital of its staff and gets gunned down by a couple of cops outside of the facility. Years later, the townies have made an annual tradition of des- ecrating the site of the murders, and tampon sales are through the roof. After engaging in said tradition, our


generic pack of killer fodder (including eminent scream queen Danielle Harris) unwinds with some booze, nookie and a 16mm screening of Attack of the Killer Tomatoes. After a few of them are grue- somely dispatched, the remaining partiers (and a drunken cemetery worker, hilariously played by Bill Moseley) make their way to the mental hospital and face the naked, hatchet-wielding spectre of Bloody Mary herself. With Blood Night, emerging horror auteur


Sabatella doesn’t try to give us something heady or deep – just a straight-up supernatural slasher that’s as entertaining as it is graphic, which makes it a pleasant surprise for a direct-to-video title. There’s enough tasty, practical gore gags here to make this ultimately unoriginal effort a genuinely


The cool things we horror fans associate with the 1980s – cinematic sex and violence – were re- ally just holdovers from the ’70s with a more garish colour scheme, and dumbed down even further for easy consumption by an increas- ingly less discerning audience. This is a point filmmaker Drew Rosas appears to have missed entirely with Blood Junkie, a love letter to ’80s slasher films that feels a lot more like junk mail. Rosas sets his film in 1989, which is even


worse because it’s not just the ’80s but specif- ically a year when anyone with a lick of sense or a shred of good taste was well and truly fed up and couldn’t wait for the decade to end. He presents us with four vapid, unlikeable teens


and a bratty kid on a weekend camping trip in Wis- consin who run afoul of a disfigured killer who lives in an abandoned chemical testing facility. Well, at least that’s what happens eventually, but only after 40 minutes of gawdawful dialogue and a parade of the worst fashion crimes of the late 20th century. We get only the briefest of nudity from patently obvious body doubles before the profoundly uninspired and poorly staged chase scenes and murders finally get underway, and then it’s over. Since Rosas is clearly


incapable of distinguish- ing baby from bath water, I’ll close with a memo to any other filmmak- ers who want to milk the nostalgia cycle. Fifties nostalgia was huge in the ’70s because a new gen- eration of teens was discovering early rock ’n’ roll, hot rods and poodle skirts, and categorically not be- cause anyone wanted to relive stifling Eisenhower- era conservatism or the threat of nuclear war. Similarly, the ’60s craze in the ’80s stemmed from an appetite for psychedelic music, recreational drugs and casual sex that wasn’t associated with AIDS. It was not because anyone wanted to re-ex- perience race riots or the Vietnam War. Ergo, should you choose to mine a decade with considerably less to recommend it than most, you need to cherry-pick your pop culture tropes more judiciously. Bring on the sex and violence, bearing in mind that most of us would happily forego mullets, acid-wash jeans and shit music.


JOHN W. BOWEN


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