Lying and Dying in ‘Cry_Wolf’ (2005)

A few years after SCREAM reinvigorated the slasher in 1996, competition shows were all the rage on American shores. Physical prowess and endurance were rewarded with large cash prizes and instant celebrity on shows like SURVIVOR, which bowed in May of 2000, and THE AMAZING RACE, which debuted a year later. Likewise, talent was rewarded with cash and – more importantly – opportunity. Talent manager Simon Fuller – onetime manager of The Spice Girls – saw an opportunity to create records and ratings and created a little show called POP IDOL in the UK in 2001 and its U.S. counterpart AMERICAN IDOL a year later in which the winner (and runner-up in most cases) received a lucrative recording contract and an unprecedented launching pad. Aspiring filmmakers found similar opportunity on PROJECT GREENLIGHT, which was created by Alex Keledjian and had the marquee-caliber names of Ben Affleck and Matt Damon producing. The winning filmmaker of PROJECT GREENLIGHT, which also bowed in 2001, was given the chance to direct a feature film.

This seemingly random history lesson in reality competition shows adds an important footnote in framing the inception of CRY_WOLF, which has its roots – financially, at least – in this early period of competition craze. Aspiring filmmaker Jeff Wadlow, a Dartmouth and USC grad and nephew of Katie Couric – won the 2002 Chrysler Million Dollar Film Competition, an Internet contest co-sponsored by Chrysler and Universal in which he and his producing and writing partner, Beau Bauman, were given a mini DV and a laptop and ten days to shoot and edit a brand new short film featuring a Chrysler car. Based on their success in making it through to the top five, the next round of the competition included a two-month filmmakers boot camp-style residency during which they shot a five-minute presentation piece called LIVING THE LIE, a modern-day retelling of Aesop's fable about the boy who cried wolf, starring Topher Grace and Estella Warren. That short was pitched to a panel of industry professionals at the Toronto Film Festival and snared them a feature production deal with Universal and a million dollar budget.

The resulting CRY_WOLF, released in September of 2005, essentially serves as Wadlow’s calling card to genre fans, with an impressive box office return on his modest budget of $10 million domestically and another $5.5 million internationally.

The story – co-penned with Bauman – centers around Owen, a British transfer student to the autumnally resplendent campus of Westlake Preparatory Academy. Owen quickly falls in with a group of privileged mischief-makers who meet at night in the boarding school’s chapel to play a strange variation of the Russian party game Mafia in which a designated shepherd secretly chooses a wolf in the group while the rest are deemed sheep. As the players try to guess the identity of that round’s wolf, each sheep has to make a convincing case / defend his or her honor while the designated wolf hones his or her casual deception skills to avoid detection. Essentially, the best liar wins. Collective boredom – so often the catalyst for subsequent slasher mayhem in movies like this – causes the group to raise the stakes, expanding the playing field to the entire school by creating an elaborate mythology about a fictional serial killer, tying it to the recent real-life murder of a local girl, and sending it out to the student body via an email that quickly goes viral.

  

Before you can log onto your AOL, instant messages heralding the imminent arrival of a killer matching the group’s description begin popping up on Owen’s computer and the rumor co-conspirators find themselves seemingly stalked like sheep for the slaughter. Red herrings abound as Owen and company try to figure out the masked Wolf’s identity – from a creepy caretaker who’s conspicuously loitering on the fringes of almost every crowd shot to Jon Bon Jovi’s (requisite rocker locks intact) smarmy chess-playing journalism instructor to an chunky fellow student ousted from the roguish clique during the last late-night round of their lying game.

Although Wadlow has a clear affinity for the slasher, with elements of genre classics like APRIL FOOL’S DAY and HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO ME evident, CRY_WOLF is surprisingly timid for a slasher with the director favoring plot manipulation over archetypal formula trappings. While the film’s minimal gore and low body count might seem like a natural non-starter and the ambitiously labyrinthine plot twists and turns will ring decidedly more Agatha Christie than John Carpenter, this rather inventive giallo-style psychological murder-mystery-horror-thriller (how’s that for sub-genre specificity?) gets points for attempting to bring some ingenuity to the genre’s tired clichés.

Where CRY_WOLF might lose points in terms of comparison against slasher films of the golden era 80’s, it ably gains more than a few when viewed through the post-modern lens established with Wes Craven’s seminal SCREAM. But while Craven looked inward and laughed boisterously outward at his source material, Wadlow looks inward but subtly winks with an almost indiscernible twitch of his eye at the genre’s predecessors from which he drew inspiration. The self-reflectiveness of CRY_WOLF is simultaneously better integrated and sharper than SCREAM’s meta elements, in effect paying a greater deal of reverence to the slasher fan.

Take, for example, the ingenious way Wadlow fashions his villain and the murderous legend surrounding him – with his victims carefully constructing him themselves using a well-established predetermined slasher criteria that includes visual image (orange ski mask, camouflage jacket), a favored weapon (hunting knife), modus operandi (lots of stabbing, disembowelment, and tongue removal), and catchy moniker (The Wolf). In essence, Wadlow makes his teen slasher fodder here complicit in their fates in that they give actual life to their killer through their careful assembly of his traits and then unleashing him onto the world through their elaborate Internet rumor.

 

Even the politically correct exaggeration of the ethnic diversity of Wadlow’s liars club, while adhering to the slasher’s requisite roll call of stock characters – the do-gooder hero/heroine, the love interest, the jock, the airhead, the slut, the rebel, the token black guy – is a marvelous nod to the self-reference necessary in the post-modern slasher film. But the best in-joke that Wadlow sets up beautifully is in the false foreshadowing of the teens planning to leave their prep school campus for a weekend of unsupervised debauchery at somebody’s remote lake house — and then don’t – is a delightfully clever middle finger to formula and a giant wink to the hardcore fan base. Of note, as well, is Wadlow’s subversion of the pervasive Final Girl trope, tasking Owen with the duties of last boy standing.

From the underscore in the title of the film, which prefigures the electronic communication that’s central to its plot, Wadlow’s other notable achievement with CRY_WOLF is his simultaneous use and subversion of technology within the slasher blueprint. While on the surface it might seem like modern technology – cell phones, Internet access, instant messaging – might dilute the sense of isolation necessary to create tension, Wadlow subverts that idea and proves that it’s access which is truly scary and imperils the film’s victims. Tapping into audiences’ well-founded fears of anonymous online interaction being a conduit for danger, technology here is more detriment than saving grace, with the teens essentially granting the killer access to their world through their high-tech gadgets and gizmos. Death by virtual invitation. Wadlow uses the same technology that would traditionally be used to expose the killer and again subverts its use to one granting the killer subterfuge by allowing him to lurk within the anonymity of the Internet, his computer screen as effectively cloaking his identity as his ski mask. Even the seemingly innocuous use of an iPod and a cheap pair of ear buds – here successors to the precedent blunders of forgotten keys, dropped flashlights, and inopportune underwear-clad excursions into rainstorms – prove to be dangerous miscalculations in Wadlow’s information-age slasher.

Although there’s no one amongst Wadlow’s group of apathetic teens who invent a knife-wielding psycho for giggles with whom to readily sympathize, at least the cast of CRY_WOLF is a few grades above average, with Julian Morris (whose genre credits now include SORORITY ROW, DONKEY PUNCH, and TV’s PRETTY LITTLE LIARS) taking up lead as final boy Owen; standout Lindy Booth (of WRONG TURN and 2004’s DAWN OF THE DEAD remake); and Jared Padalecki (of HOUSE OF WAX, 2009’s FRIDAY THE 13^TH reboot, and television’s long-running SUPERNATURAL) being the most distinguishable of the teens-in-peril. Cameo appearances by vets like Gary Cole (of the excellent THE TOWN THAT DREADED SUNDOWN remake, TV’s THE GOOD WIFE, and myriad other credits including the mid-nineties series AMERICAN GOTHIC) and Anna Deavere Smith (NURSE JACKIE, THE WEST WING) and the aforementioned supporting turn by Bon Jovi (who’s dabbled respectably in acting over the years with a supporting role in the submarine drama U-571 opposite Matthew McConaughey and a ten-episode arc on TV’s ALLY MCBEAL among other credits) lend the needed adult gravitas.

Visually, the film hits all the right notes, with daytime scenes washed in fall-like oranges and reds lending to the academic atmosphere and nighttime interiors inside campus buildings rendered in the appropriate shadows and murk. Of particular note is an impressive scene set in a cavernous library equipped with energy-saving motion-detector lighting that’s used to excellent effect.

The main question that niggles at the film’s detractors seems to be whether genre eventually overwhelms ingenuity or vice versa. Arguably, for some, CRY_WOLF is a serviceable slasher flick disguised as a mystery-thriller; for others, it’s a mystery-thriller disguised as a slasher. Either way, most would agree that the film itself is (pardon the obvious pun) a wolf in sheep’s clothing – it’s left open to debate what clothes it’s wearing. 

Light on gore with a lower than expected body count, CRY_WOLF still deserves its passing grade based on the ambitiousness of its intricate storyline and its underappreciated degree of shrewd self-referentialism. While fundamentally a clone-like composite of every slasher that came before it – like many a good slasher are – CRY_WOLF gets an “A” for effort in trying to step out ahead of the pack. 

Slashback: Family Matters in 'American Gothic' (1988)

With poster art that parodies Grant Wood’s famous painting of the same name, this late entry in the 1980’s slasher boom was more likely to be first discovered amongst the cluttered VHS rental shelves of a video store than in a proper cinema despite being given a modest theatrical release in the spring of 1988.

Rod Steiger and Yvonne DeCarlo topline this slice of Canadian schlock as the psychotic scripture-spouting parents of a backwoods Bible-fearing family of three middle-aged adults with childlike minds and decidedly adult homicidal tendencies. Grown daughter Fanny (Janet Wright) wears her hair in pig tails and totes around a mummified baby in a veiled bassinet; pudgy son Teddy (William Hootkins) has a childish temper matched only by his adult libido; and giggling son Woody (Michael J. Pollard) is a taunting tattletale.  

When three irritating yuppie couples charter a plane for a weekend camping getaway, you know it’s only a matter of seconds after the synthesizer-heavy opening credits before their prop plane’s engine sputters out and the requisite emergency landing strands them on a generic forest-shrouded island of dubious derivation. After establishing that the plane won’t start and the radio won’t work, the hapless slasher fodder set out in search of help, instead stumbling upon the Rockwellian farmhouse of Ma and Pa (the actual character names!).

Although the six ill-fated travelers of AMERICAN GOTHIC are chronologically older than their high school and college-age slasher film predecessors, advanced age does little to aid in the development of internal alarms even after they step into the timeworn time warp of Ma and Pa’s parlor and break bread with the family.

What follows is a by-the-numbers slasher, with dashes of incest, necrophilia, and infanticide thrown in to sweeten the carnage casserole. Like all good slashers, AMERICAN GOTHIC is requisitely cliché-ridden and fans will find much comfort in the film’s essentially intact formula, right down to its killer tagline: The family that slays together stays together. The inventive kills here mimic childhood games – murder by swing and jump rope, eye gouging with a toy soldier's bayonet.

Then – after the largely forgettable cast is systematically slaughtered by the murderous trio of siblings – AMERICAN GOTHIC does something interesting with its final girl, veering from the obligatory chase scene and into the decidedly more grindhouse-gothic territory of early 70’s films like TERROR AT RED WOLF INN. Lone survivor Cynthia (Sarah Torgov) – who we know from flashbacks is of questionable sanity herself following the bathtub drowning death of her baby and a stint in a “clinic” of indiscernible origin – seemingly snaps and is adopted as Ma and Pa’s fourth “child”. Now dressed as Fanny’s clone in shiny black Mary Janes, pink-gingham dress, and pigtails, Cynthia seems right at home with her new wackadoodle family – at least until it’s bath time for Fanny’s baby mummy. Flashing back to her own baby’s death, Cynthia re-snaps and struggles with Fanny for the baby, whose mummified head is ripped from its body in the ensuing scuffle. Baby mummy’s beheading earns Fanny a bloody bludgeoning with a galvanized steel tub and each remaining member of the family their own Cynthia-style comeuppance. Like many a final girl before and after her, poor Cynthia is left abandoned – both physically on the island and mentally in her own mind – to stew in her own insanity, cradling and cooing to her (dead and decapitated) baby mummy.

Although Director John Hough was no stranger to genre fare, having directed THE LEGEND OF HELL HOUSE (1973), THE WATCHER IN THE WOODS (1980), and THE INCUBUS (1982), he never manages to balance the dark humor with the requisite chills necessary to ground the slasher mayhem – and the result is an uneven film that never quite gains a firm footing in either comedy or horror. Still, AMERICAN GOTHIC does manage to achieve the camp factor of the earlier MOTEL HELL in spots when it isn’t dipping its toes into the completely absurd.  Steiger and DeCarlo – questionably slumming it here – chew the scenery with particularly gleeful abandon, later incarnations of Farmer Vincent and his sausage-making sister, Ida. Wright, who bears a passing resemblance to MOTEL’s late Nancy Parsons, is chillingly good as Fanny – putting to rest the question of what would have happened if John Waters ever decided to remake WHATEVER HAPPENED TO BAY JANE? with an adult Shirley Temple in the lead.



Interestingly, Hough may have actually been ahead of his time with AMERICAN GOTHIC and its twisted take on religion and family values years before the evangelical political galvanization here in this country. Although remake-weary audiences are loathe to endure yet another slasher film reboot, reimagining, or recalibration, the timeliness of Hough’s – and screenwriters Burt Wetanson’s and Michael Vines’ – source material may be ripe for some restyling.

By 1988, the golden era of the slasher film had begun its inevitable pop culture fade, retiring for its eight-year nap before SCREAM would re-awaken it, refreshed for at least awhile. Even diehard fans of the popular sub-genre knew it was time to give the slasher a rest when the imitators were being imitated, when films like AMERICAN GOTHIC ripped off earlier HALLOWEEN and FRIDAY THE 13TH rip-offs like JUST BEFORE DAWN and HUMONGOUS.

On the surface, AMERICAN GOTHIC is equal parts corny and well-worn, but – at least on repeated viewings over time – the film washes over like a hallucinogenic fever dream.

Slashback: The Understated Brilliance of Formula in ‘Final Exam’

College campuses have been fertile ground for slasher films, going back as far as 1932 with the sorority sisters revenge flick THIRTEEN WOMEN before hitting the mainstream in 1974 with BLACK CHRISTMAS. In the 90’s and beyond, the tradition continued with films like URBAN LEGEND, CRY_WOLF, and SCREAM 2.

While the cost of higher education soared in the Regan-era 80’s, the college crowd in the slasher films of that decade paid for their tuition in blood – literally – in films like THE DORM THAT DRIPPED BLOOD, THE HOUSE ON SORORITY ROW, TO ALL A GOOD NIGHT, and FINAL EXAM.

FINAL EXAM is a painfully sincere 1981 entry in the slasher canon that’s light on gore and nearly tension-free, with a grainy grindhouse look that even a respectable DVD transfer can’t hide. But look a little closer and you’ll find a rather insightful commentary on the randomness of modern society that’s carried through in every aspect of the film.

In the post-credit prologue, a student couple is making out in a convertible parked by a lake on the campus of March College. The set-up is by-the-numbers: an uneasy girl who wants the top back up and declarations of love before she’ll offer herself to a horny, feather-haired football quarterback. Branches snap, the car bounces slightly, and before the jock can finish explaining why they’re better off parking on campus than some deserted road, a butcher knife slices through the convertible’s roof. Our hapless frat boy is swiftly pulled up through the roof and flung onto the hood of the car where we see the knife plunge repeatedly downward. Girl screams. End scene.

Cut to neighboring Lanier College, where much time is spent introducing us to the usual assortment of potential victims preparing for the end of the semester and...wait for it…final exams. There’s Courtney (Cecile Bagdadi), a Laurie Strode knock-off from the virtue and insecurity right down to the hair; the oddly named Radish (Joel S. Rice), a pocket-protected flaming nerd who makes SAVED BY THE BELL’S Screech look butch by comparison; Wildman(Ralph Brown), the clichéd vulgar dumb jock; Mark (John Fallon), the preppy, over-privileged all-American frat boy; Lisa (DeAnna Robbins), the worldly promiscuous coed sleeping with her lothario Chemistry professor; Janet (Sherri Willis-Burch), the lovestruck, wide-eyed Southern belle; and Gary (Terry W. Farren), the sensitive, gullible fraternity pledge. Let’s double-check our slasher roll call: final girl, leading man, nerd, dumb jock, slut, and loving young heterosexual couple (here standing in for the lone black guy who dies first) – all present and accounted for.

The introductory scenes – while screenwriter/director Jimmy Huston’s earnest attempt at establishing character – are tortuous. Punctuated by schmaltzy, made-for-TV movie music, these early scenes are filled with woe-is-me ruminations like “If I don’t pass my chemistry test, my parents will stop making the payments on my car!” and other assorted teen angst about how tough life is, ultimately making it hard to empathize with much of the cast. There are lots of references to how empty the campus is; meanwhile the backgrounds are packed with extras. Also lots of ominous foreboding going on that masquerades as meaningful character interaction, like Courtney’s exploration of her resentment toward fellow coed Lisa and her seeming “free ride” through life about whom Radish (insightfully) predicts, “She’ll pay a price sooner or later – there is no free lunch.” There is if she’s got the meal plan, but that’s not really the point, I suppose.

There are some semblances of subplot here. In one, an elaborate fraternity prank during which masked gunmen “open fire” on a crowded quadrangle helps Mark ensure his passing grade on that chemistry test by creating a diversion. And while much of the film comes across outdated as one would suspect (antiquated fraternity pinning as a courtship ritual anyone?), this nearly 30-year-old scene plays with a particularly audacious political incorrectness in today’s post-Columbine world.

After what seems hours after the staged incident, the town’s redneck sheriff (Sam Kilman) finally shows up channeling Bo Svenson with a drawl. Needless to say, he’s not pleased to find out that the whole thing’s a fraternity prank and this sets the scene for his later refusal to come back to Lanier when the bodies start falling out of gym lockers.

Finally, after what seems like interminable chattering about love, life, and the pursuit of passing grades (in reality, it’s about 55 minutes), the body count begins. Four stabbings, one head pulled through a door, and one mildly inventive garroting involving gym equipment later and it’s off to the protracted final chase during which the killer (Timothy L. Raynor) arrives via dumbwaiter(!) and the telephones actually work! Courtney is pursued across campus through suddenly empty dorms, vacant cafeterias, and finally what appears to be a bell-less bell tower. Just when she’s cornered at the top and looks like she’s done for, the football coach (Jerry Rushing) – who, it’s alluded to in an earlier scene, is something of an accomplished archer – arrives with bow and arrow in-hand. He shoots but doesn’t score – the killer actually catches the shooting arrow with one arm(!) – and then makes haste up the stairs on a head-on collision with the descending killer that ends with the coach’s own arrow being thrust through his chest. Our killer hoofs it back up the stairs (this maniac is really put through his paces here) where Courtney has found a convenient two-by-four, which she promptly begins to pummel him with until he takes a Michael Myers-esque swan dive over the railing and plummets umpteenth stories to his “death.” Mmm hmm.

Breathing a sigh of relief, Courtney comes down the stairs and walks within inches of our killer’s supposedly lifeless body in the film’s requisite Adrienne King-in-a-canoe scene. After the traditional ankle grab, resourceful Court picks up the killer’s butcher knife – which has opportunely landed right there within reach of his body – and stabs him exactly one dozen times. Having passed this test of survival (dare I say, her final exam), she takes her well-earned battered and bloody stroll down the front steps of the building where she proceeds to cradle her head in her arms as the end credits roll.

Let’s give the detractors their due. Yes, at first glance, FINAL EXAM does seem like a cheap derivative. There are the requisite nods to HALLOWEEN, like when Courtney spies the killer lurking outside her dorm from a 2nd floor window or the standard killer POV shots or the shadow of the killer passing behind a clueless victim-to-be or the murky silhouette of the killer lying in wait just out of sight on a stairwell. There’s the film's score that sounds like a mash-up of the soundtracks from HALLOWEEN and HE KNOWS YOU’RE ALONE. FINAL EXAM also gives us all the illogic we come to expect from a slasher film. I mean, just how does cinema’s slowest moving killer make it back to Courtney’s room before Radish, who runs faster that a would-be bride on discount day at Filene’s Basement?

FINAL EXAM also lends some credibility to theorists who hypothesize that the slasher film is often chock-full of generous queer subtext. Indeed, one doesn’t need to look too deeply for the blatant homoeroticism in FINAL EXAM. If the master-servant nature between fraternity brother and pledge isn’t quite enough to convince you, how about Wildman’s overt nuzzling of pledge Gary’s ear before the rest of the frat gang strips him to his underwear and ties him to a tree? Bondage, tighty-whities, being force stripped by a gang of hunky college guys who seem to be enjoying the proceedings a little too much – can you say gay porn? Still not enough? Then try to look at John Fallon’s khaki-clad ass throughout the film and not use the word bottom.

Alright, so why haven’t I said much about FINAL EXAM’S killer? Well, there’s not much to say. Our killer has no identity – no name, no backstory, no signature mask. He’s a nondescript Caucasian male who wears jeans and an army fatigue jacket and drives a black panel van with no markings. He doesn’t speak, he doesn’t grunt. He has no facial expressions, and Huston makes no effort to conceal him. Yet he’s an important aspect of FINAL EXAM’S underlying strength: its understatement.

Yes, that’s right, a slasher film that’s understated – understated to the point of being so bland, so generic, that it could be easily overlooked as yet another lifeless HALLOWEEN imitation. And it is, but yet it’s not. Confused? Let me try to explain.

I think Jimmy Huston was on to something – something he actually pulls off, but so subtly that he appears to miss the mark to less discerning viewers quick to dismiss this as yet another Carpenter clone. Huston appears to be making a comment on the changing landscape of the early 80’s, a decade in which everything – from sound to clothing to corporate career paths – was becoming so rote and routine as to be losing any semblance of character or individuality. It was the decade of the copycat – art forms copying themselves and artists cashing in. Different facade, same core. We saw it in everything from primetime soaps, to synthesized music, to, yes, slasher films. One led to another, to another, to another. Formula was cash, and cash was king. This genericism permeates throughout FINAL EXAM’S characterless college campus, its genre-defying unimaginative kills, its featureless protagonist. Even the absence of people of color in the cast seems to speak to a certain degree of societal white-washing if one looks close enough.

This theme of societal monotony comes full circle and is realized in the randomness of the film’s violence. Even in the bona fide HALLOWEEN clones, the killers weren’t without their reasons: a jilted lover in HE KNOWS YOU'RE ALONE, a traumatized fraternity pledge in TERROR TRAIN, a grieving brother in PROM NIGHT. Yes, it’s all about revenge of some kind, but there is genuine human motivation behind it.

There is a raison d’être, a reason for being.

But here, our killer has no reason. His acts of killing are random, monotonous. Even the film’s final girl is seemingly selected at random when she merely passes by the killer’s parked van. As fretful Radish says at one point in the film, “People are killed for no reason every day.” And so it is, too, in FINAL EXAM, that students are killed without premeditation, order, or any particular passion. Physical presence is the only prerequisite for being marked for death. Huston’s nameless, faceless, characterless killer represented all that was random and meaningless in the evolving culture of the 80’s. The senseless crimes of serial killers like Gary Leon Ridgway (The Green River Killer), Donald Harvey (Angel of Death), Ted Bundy, and Robert Hansen held working-class America in a grip of fear with their reign of seemingly random killings. AIDS didn’t make sense – it claimed random victims in a monotonous replication. There was randomness and monotony in the evolution of the corporate male experience in the 80’s (explored to the point of brilliant hyperbole in both the book and film versions of AMERICAN PSYCHO). There was even retail repetitiveness in everyday suburbia, where different designer labels were slapped on the same products – where arbitrary values were placed on certain yuppie accoutrements.

Huston’s film captures that uninspired time in our culture and the formulaic patterns of the time. Unfortunately, the irony of a formulaic slasher epitomizing everything that was mechanical about our evolving culture at the time was lost on the casual viewer hungry for a higher, bloodier body count and a flash or two of boobies.

Footnotes:

WHERE ARE THEY NOW? For Bagdadi (Courtney), Brown (Wildman), Fallon (Mark), and Ferren (Gary, aka Pledge), FINAL EXAM would be their only brush with filmland. Willis-Burch (Janet) made just one more movie, the aforementioned KILLER PARTY. Robbins (Lisa) went on to work on several daytime soap operas and did some episodic TV before dropping off the radar in the late eighties. Rushing (Coach) made thirteen additional films until 2000 when he retired from acting and opened a year-round wild boar hunting preserve near Taylorsville, North Carolina, called the Chestnut Hunting Lodge. Only Rice (Radish) and, interestingly, Raynor (Killer) continue to work in the industry today. Kilman (Sheriff) died in 1998 at the age of 57, after making only one appearance on DALLAS post EXAM.

DVD RELEASE: The DVD release, while nothing in the technical department to write home about, is worth the VHS conversion if only for the three cast interviews included.

Joel S. Rice (Radish) chats about the film’s six-week shoot in Shelby, North Carolina, and reveals that he left acting in the mid-eighties to pursue a Masters degree in Social Work. He eventually missed the entertainment industry and came back as a producer and has produced over 25 TV movies since the early nineties (although he did make a brief return to acting playing a math teacher in the family-friendly 2007 TV-movie SHREDDERMAN RULES, directed by Savage Steve Holland of cult-classic BETEROFF DEAD fame).

Cecile Bagdadi (Courtney) contributes an amusing anecdote about how she botched her first “scream test” while auditioning. After some practice, she landed the lead role and became such an effective screamer that her shrieks were actually used to dub other actresses in the film.

Sherry Willis-Burch (Janet) shares her memories of the difficulties in shooting her death scene, as well as her brief small-town fame in her Texas hometown. Willis-Burch, who’s now a 1st grade teacher, jokes that she eventually graduated to the final girl role in the Canadian-lensed KILLER PARTY.

The interviews are relatively brief, but it’s great fun to see these three and share in their fond memories of making FINAL EXAM some 28 odd years after the film’s release.

Slashback: The Brooding Brothers and Boushels of Blueberries of 'Humongous' (1982)

“It’s loose…It’s angry…and it’s getting hungry!”

No, it’s not a paparazzi caption describing Rosie O’Donnell headed downtown for lunch after getting the axe at The View; it’s actually the cheesy tagline from the obscure 1982 slasher flick Humongous.

Hot on the heels of their successful Prom Night, director Paul Lynch and screenwriter William Gray collaborated on this low-budget slasher that combines everything tolerant fans love and loathe in a slasher movie. Although the film suffered marvelously from the horrendous acting of the unlikeable twenty-something’s in peril and some of the most frustratingly murky cinematography ever that renders entire scenes impenetrably black, Humongous boasted a decent backstory and an appropriately creepy, isolated setting. Also of note, Humongous bucked the trendiness of the day and opted for plenty of spinal cord snapping and skull crushing instead of the hipper, more inventive kills with power tools and kitchen utensils that were the staples of other slasher films. John Mills-Cockell also gets props for his moody film score, especially the quick intensification and drop of synthesizer notes that he uses judiciously as a powerful audio effect during some of the stalking scenes.

In the pre-credit prologue, we’re informed that it’s Labor Day Weekend, 1946, and there’s a party in full swing. As couples kiss and canoodle on a giant wraparound porch, young Ida Parsons is admiring her pen of vicious-looking dogs and trying to rebuff the unwelcome advances of a drunken suitor. Fleeing her inebriated admirer, Ida inexplicably takes shelter behind a tree and – even more inexplicably - lights up a cigarette. The admirer follows, confrontation ensues, and soon Ida finds herself thrown to the ground and being raped by the intoxicated lothario. But Ida’s faithful pooches sense trouble, their doggie ESP goes into overdrive, and they escape their cage and proceed to viciously maul her attacker in that classic slasher sense of poetic justice. But before the guy’s throat is literally ripped out by one of the dogs, Ida commands them to stop, preferring to deliver two final blows to the head of her bloodied rapist herself. The scene ends with Ida staring all loony-like out at nothing – announcing to the audience that the poor gal has gone ‘round the proverbial bend.

Opening credits flash amidst a montage of old photos meant to convey more of Ida’s backstory and show her transformation from well-to-do society reveler to matronly-looking recluse.

Following are some post-prologue opening shots that provide the obligatory introductions to the cast of character-victims. There are three siblings – brooding brother Nick (John Wildman), do-gooder brother Eric (David Wallace), and nerdy sister Carla (Janit Baldwin) – and the brothers’ model-esque girlfriends Sandy (Janet Julian) and Donna (Joy Boushel). Surprisingly, the cast resembles the gang from Scooby Doo – from Wallace’s Fred-esque blond blandness, Wildman’s Shaggy-esque hair, and Baldwin’s ridiculously oversized Thelma-esque glasses. Note: Best to let Julian and Boushel fight it out for Daphne, although you’d be wise to put your money on the latter.

So the party of five sets out on a luxury cabin cruiser across an enormous unnamed lake somewhere in Canada. Boushel gyrates on the boat’s deck to corny Euro-disco, Wildman sulks; Wallace ogles Boushel before groping Julian’s ass. All in a day in the life of the vacationing and carefree American-by-way-of-Canadian young person of indeterminate college age.

That night, navigating the boat through the foggy night waters, the group picks up a stranded boater named Bert (Lane Coleman) who warns that they’re headed for the rocks and the ominous-sounding Dog Island. Cue the baleful dog howls. Bert’s the requisite outsider whose primary purpose is to connect the prologue to the film proper, since most horror filmmakers of the era assumed that slasher fans were notoriously stupid. So Bert tells the group about the mysterious island, once owned by the wealthy Parsons family who made their fortune in the lumber business. He mentions that a strange old woman, who only comes over to the mainland for supplies twice a year at change of season, still inhabits the island with her dogs. Jeepers! I think we’ve found a clue, Scooby.

For reasons of sibling rivalry not entirely made clear, the ever-rebellious Nick decides he can navigate the boat through the treacherous waters himself, despite the fretful protestations of the group. A brotherly scuffle ensues and - before you can say “Watch out for those rocks!” – the boat runs aground at high speed, catching fire and giving the passengers scarcely enough time to jump overboard before the fiery explosion. With little choice, the group – minus Carla who goes MIA for a bit – swims to the ill-reputed Dog Island where they find themselves wet, cold, and stranded with something that snarls and growls in the bushes. Old Ida’s faithfully vicious canine sentries or the hideously deformed byproduct of young Ida’s rape thirty years earlier? You do the math, but bet on both. And, while you’re making wagers, bet that it isn’t long before the group is split, stalked, and systematically slaughtered in tried-and-true slasher tradition.

By morning’s light, Nick has run afoul of the titular slasher in the boathouse (Wildman’s overacting notwithstanding, he lets out one of the most convincing male slasher victim screams ever), while Donna hangs back on the beach with a broken-legged Bert. Boushel, put to far better use here than she was as Terror Train’s Pet, puts her Penthouse-worthy breasts to gratuitous good use – first using her ample bosom as a makeshift basket to transport blueberries(!) and then as an impromptu warming blanket when injured-but-horny Bert eventually slips into shock. Nudity for medicinal purposes, indeed.

Eventually, Eric, Sandy, and the recently-found Carla make their way to the dilapidated lodge of the pre-credit sequence for some requisite Clue Club exploration. Along the way, Sandy notes the absence of sound, astutely noting “like there’s nothing alive here.” (The profusion of bones and skulls of the island’s missing wildlife probably should have been her first clue, huh?) At the lodge, they find a nursery complete with broken toys and a diary that tells of a baby born with acromegaly, now confirming (Thank God! I couldn’t really follow along without these cinematic CliffsNotes!) that Ida did indeed find herself knocked up following her pre-credit attack and birthed a deformed young’un. The shrinking Scooby gang eventually finds both ‘ole Ida’s corpse and Humongo’s basement lair, where the bodies are hung from the rafters with care.

After a denouement that borrows heavily (read: rips off) from Friday the 13th Part 2’s final-girl-throws-on-a-shawl-and-pretends-to-be-mama shtick and a Halloween over-the-banister-and-down-the-staircase fall, the obligatory extended final chase scene ends in a boathouse conflagration that gives us our only decent look at ‘ole Humongo (and Brenda Kirk's creature make-up, to be differentiated from and not confused with Maureen Sweeney Donati's Humongous head creation) and the requisite false-sense-of-security-before-the-final-shock shot.

The film’s closing shot is of our final girl, battered and bloody, sitting on the end of the dock, quivering, humming, and staring all loony-like over the bleak piano score. Ida Parsons come full circle. This last frame – common in the films of the subhuman slasher sub-genre like The Funhouse and Hell Night - underscores the idea that although the final girl triumphs physically in the end, her survival comes at a hefty psychological price.

Derivative and poorly made, yes, but Humongous endures because it has heart. Even the bad acting can’t disguise the actors’ earnestness. And although Wallace is far too pretty to be taken seriously as the tough leading man, Julian makes a respectable final girl. In the end, Humongous earns its place alongside better made subhuman slasher outings like The Funhouse and Hell Night, if for nothing but its sincerity and its celebration of the genre it was trying to emulate.

Fun Fact: Garry Robbins, who played the film's titular creature and was credited as "Ida's Son," showed up playing another slasher heavy in 2003's Wrong Turn as the redneck-cannibal character of Saw-Tooth.

Slashback: The Hospital Horrors of 'Visiting Hours' (1982)

Once in awhile, a random remark on a message board prompts me to revisit a film that memory proves to have distorted over time. Watching the slasher film poll here on the blog, I was surprised that someone cast a vote for Visiting Hours. Even more surprising, when I traced the vote back to a poster on the Shocklines message board, the author recalled seeing the film with his mother and having a great time. It’s one of those slasher flicks you remember more for the concept than the execution – in this case, it’s always been categorized as “the hospital slasher” in my mind. But the enthusiasm for the flick by that message board user prompted a trip to the DVD library and a stroll down slasher memory lane.

Released in May 1982 at the height of the slasher craze, Visiting Hours at once attempted to rise above the slasher genre while rooting its narrative structure firmly in the popular stalk-and-slash formula. Much like The Fan the year before, Visiting Hours was unique for what it tried to be – a slick, stylish thriller – versus what it really was – a formulaic slasher. And like The Fan, which thought it could disguise its slasher roots by employing Oscar nominee (later an actual winner for The Mirror Has Two Faces) Lauren Bacall, Oscar winner Maureen Stapleton, TV mainstay James Garner, and a young Michael Biehn (as the killer) in the roles usually reserved for Canadian unknowns, Visiting Hours likewise attempted its own high-brow casting with Oscar winner Lee Grant, TV mainstays William Shatner and Linda Purl, and a young Michael Ironside (as its killer). But a well-dressed girl does not a debutante make, and the film’s marketing campaign (complete with its original, sublime tagline “So frightening, you’ll never recover”) soon confirmed suspicions that Lee Grant was simply slumming it in final girl territory, reserved more for up-and-comers like Jamie Lee Curtis than “legitimate” actresses like her or Bacall.

The story also attempted to circumvent its slasher pedigree with a decidedly more overt political commentary than its slasher brethren. Like the countless slashers that came before and after its release, Visiting Hours told a cautionary tale – in this case, the dangers of intensifying feminism in a man’s world. Grant plays Deborah Ballin, an aggressive TV newscaster whose on-air campaign defending a battered housewife accused of murdering her husband draws the attention of misogynic janitor Colt Hawker (Michael Ironside, who uncannily channels both Jack Nicholson and John Saxon here), who works in the studio. Background checks, anyone? Ballin’s feminist views are apparently too much for the clearly unhinged Hawker, who steals away to the unsuspecting newscaster’s house, dispatches with the maid (off-screen), and then brutally attacks Ballin in a tense, well-directed sequence reserved for (and worthy of) a third act chase. A bruised and bloodied Ballin eludes death and is carted off by ambulance. Before you can say Halloween II, Hawker follows Ballin to the hospital and the carnage begins.

The roots of Hawkers’ deep-seeded misogyny are eventually revealed through childhood flashbacks in which the budding psychopath witnesses his mother lobbing a pan of scalding oil on his father’s face. A seemingly random subplot in which Hawker solicits, then brutalizes, a hooker (played by almost-scream queen Lenore Zann of Happy Birthday to Me, Def-Con 4, and Murder by Phone infamy) further cements his issues with women and comes nicely into play later in the film when her connection to the nurse (then TV-movie queen Linda Purl) caring for Ballin supplies a pivotal shift in the action.

It’s interesting to see the then 54-year-old Grant taking on the final girl role, and she demonstrates that even Oscar winners can chew on the scenery with the best of them, raising the bar on histrionics exponentially. Yet she proves as capable of running, tripping, staggering, and hobbling down hospital corridors as Curtis in the similarly hospital-set Halloween II the year prior, and one laughs out loud in campy, nostalgic delight when she pummels Ironside’s hands with her shoe heel as he attempts the clichéd reach-inside-the-closing-elevator-doors trick. Sadly, in the midst of the prevalent ageism that shadows Hollywood today, one is unlikely to find as mature a slasher heroine. Shatner’s contribution here is in name and face recognition only, and it’s underwhelming to watch Captain Kirk reduced to yeoman’s work as he assumes the decidedly non-juicy role of dutiful friend. Purl looks characteristically spacey and bored throughout the proceedings, and she moves so slow throughout the film that you find yourself grateful that she’s not a real nurse. Ironside proves himself a capable and menacing villain, perhaps so much so that he would go on to be typecast as the heavy throughout much of the rest of his career. Zann is the standout in her small but decisive role as Lisa, the hooker who finds herself reluctantly doing the right thing.

It’s always interesting to watch how filmmakers try to cloak a film’s slasher facade…fascinating to see how they tweak the formula to thinly veil the slicing and dicing at the film’s core. I’m always captivated by what they choose to leave in, what they choose to switch up in their quest for slasher anonymity. In Visiting Hours, gore is virtually gone, replaced by the brutality of Hawker’s modus operandi in photographing the painful grimaces on his victims’ faces as he twists the knife into the chest cavities of the nurses and patients who fall inconveniently in his path. He’s an early predecessor to the later brutality of Rob Zombie’s Firefly clan in House of 1,000 Corpses and The Devil’s Rejects or Greg McLean’s demented Crocodile Dundee crossbreed Mick Taylor in Wolf Creek. Setting is also sacrificed in the attempted slasher switcheroo, with a large metropolitan hospital offering little of the remoteness that an understaffed small-town clinic like Haddonfield Hospital does in Halloween II. Indeed, it’s hard to connect with any palpable sense of dread here, knowing that the place is crawling with doctors, nurses, security guards, and other patients. You just know that the only way Hawker is going to actually get Ballin is through a carefully orchestrated set of clearly-defined circumstances rather than the rampant opportunity that genuine isolation affords. But what the film lacks in gore and setting, it finds in plot intricacy, with the film augmenting the usual stalk-and-slash blueprint with converging subplots that add an element of authentic suspense. It was a somewhat bold departure for the time period, one clearly meant to lure an older demographic – and one that would inevitably disappoint slasher fans eager to meet the next Michael Myers or Jason Voorhees.

All things considered, director Jean-Claude Lord and scripter Brian Taggert are to be commended for trying to infuse the proceedings with a sense of class. But if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, chances are you’ve got yourself a duck. In the end, Visiting Hours is a duck that tries to gussy itself up as a goose. Waterfowl analogies aside, the film is a respectable entry in the slasher genre for the variation it attempts and even manages to pull off in spots.
Slasher Nerd Tip: See if you can spot actor Neil Affleck - he played Axel Palmer in My Bloody Valentine ('81) - in the credited role of "police officer."