A tradition of starting off the New Year with a slasher marathon might seem strange to some, but it makes about as much sense to me as eating black eyed peas.
Allow me to elaborate. I was seventeen when John Carpenter's Halloween was released. It is, to me, the ideal age to first experience the movie. I know a lot of fans grew up with slasher movies on VHS or DVD, but there was no home video to speak of back in 1978.
I already loved horror, but Halloween was something altogether different. It was a new kind of horror movie for a new generation. I was the exact target audience for it.
I knew Halloween was a masterpiece that would never be topped. It's that rare thing, a perfect movie. I wouldn't change a nanosecond.
Halloween was a big part of my transition from child to adult. As were all the slashers to follow. They suited my rebellious nature, but there was something primal in even the worst of the movies.
Most of us begin to know death by the time we reach adulthood. It was a hazy concept before that for me, but I started to know people who died. Family, neighbors, friends. Death became as real as the air I breathed and the water that sustained me.
Slasher movies reminded me that death was inevitable and could strike at any moment. It's coming, ambling along in a slow but determined stride. I could run all I liked, but death is persistent.
I could die today. A car accident, some bad food, a trip down a flight of stairs, anything could happen. However, I am alive right now. That's all that matters and that's all we have to work with.
If I am going to die someday, I will enjoy myself today. My joy is horror movies and books. Other things too, of course, but horror has always been the main thrust of my life.
I came into adulthood with slasher movies, I am entering my old age with them. Perhaps I'll die while watching one. There are worse fates.
So here I am, two weeks into 2026. I picked fourteen slasher movies, some I've seen, and some I missed. I hope you enjoy my little slasher festival.
January 1: The Mutilator 2 (2023)
There's one good thing about starting my annual New Year's slasher marathon with The Mutilator 2. Simply put, every other movie ahead will be better.
I hate to be too hard on something like this, where the people involved seem cool and were obviously having a great time. Still, I can't recommend The Mutilator 2 to anyone.
The Mutilator is a fun little slasher opus that came in as the first cycle was winding down. It's not the best, but I like it a lot. Part of it is due to fond memories of seeing The Mutilator along with Massacre at Central High at a drive-in back in '84. The movie has some choice effects from Mark Shostrum. The Mutilator is a good example of independent slasher cinema from another era.
Director Buddy Cooper threatened to unleash a sequel to The Mutilator nearly forty years after the first one. I wasn't especially enthused, but in the end I bought a DVD. I didn't expect much, and in that regard The Mutilator 2 was not a disappointment.
Taking a cue from the requel/re-imagining/legacy 2014 version of The Town That Dreaded Sundown, The Mutilator 2 reunites the the cast from the original movie, and has them appear in a sequel. It's being made in the same location, Atlantic Beach, North Carolina.
This is a silly, painfully unfunny slasher comedy. The jokes are weak, the effects are hopelessly amateur, and the performances are woeful.
It's a little like Hollywood Boulevard 2, only that one makes fun of things like The Mutilator 2. Plus Hollywood Boulevard 2 is genuinely funny.
As for the so-called story, a sequel to The Mutilator is in production, but someone is slaughtering people on the set. Terry Kiser, from the unforgivable Weekend at Bernie's, joins the cast. He's supremely unlikable, with a smug attitude and obnoxious screen presence.
The Mutilator 2 is a painful experience, with little to offer the seasoned slasher fan or the novice viewer. The movie trudges along, and the best surprise is when it abruptly and mercifully ends, with no revelation or conclusion.
There were a couple of nice second unit shots of the beach at nighttime. That's about all the praise I can come up with.
The victims wave to the cast in the end credits, just like in The Undertaker and His Pals, showing us it was all in good fun. Believe it or not, The Mutilator 2 is an even worse film.
I knew better, but I spent good, hard American dollars to see this meta-mess. Don't you make the same mistake.
Rating: 2
January 2: Night School (1981)
Night School didn't make a big ripple in the slasher pond back in 1981. It's a very well made movie, much more professional than most others of its kind. However, slasher fans wanted partying kids and young adults, wild situations and abundant murders, not boring mature grown ups.
Night School resembles a classy giallo movie. Change the language and the locations and it could have Sergio Martino's name in the credits. It's all a bit too stodgy for an American slasher movie of its day.
This was the final movie from director Kenneth Hughes. What a comedown from the man who made Of Human Bondage and, for God's sake, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.
Night School doesn't quite work as a truly prestigious film, nor as a down and dirty slice-and-dice. It's slow and laborious, with most of the violence offscreen.
Women students are being beheaded in the city of Boston. They all attend Wendall College, or are at least affiliated with it. An anthropology professor who likes to dally with his students is a likely candidate for the killer. The murders are done in the style of New Guinea tribal ceremonies. The heads must be removed and then places in some sort of water.
There's a nice scene where a noggin floats down into a large public aquarium. Night School's scene of a head discovered in a toilet bowl beat a similar moment in The House on Sorority Row by a year.
There's too much attention on bland police activity and not enough focus on the meat of the matter. There's a dumb and an inconclusive ending, wide open for another movie. Did they think Night School would be popular enough for a sequel?
Paramount made big bank from the Friday the 13th franchise, but they were still trying to figure out how these degenerate slasher movies worked. Old time Hollywood directors were not the right choice to make them.
Rating: 5
January 3: Curtains (1983)
Curtains was difficult to see before Synapse Films rescued it from obscurity. It's a decent movie, but we wouldn't be out too much if it had remained lost.
Quite a few good slasher movies came out of Canada, including classics like My Bloody Valentine, Prom Night, The Burning, Terror Train, and Black Christmas. Curtains is a fairly late entry in the first wave of the genre. Like a lot of slashers, it has strong giallo roots, but Curtains is closer to Agatha Christie than Mario Bava. It was written by Robert Guza Jr., who later became the head writer of TV soap General Hospital. The melodramatic tone of Curtains shows he was right for the job. And wrong for horror.
Curtains is largely a bloodless movie, with most of its violence offscreen. There's a creepy hag mask that's very effective. A scene where the killer skates across an icy lake bearing a sickle is the best moment in the film.
You get an ominous mannequin that looks straight out of Profondo Rosso, yet another head found in a toilet bowl, and Samantha Eggar going for the Joan Crawford Award for Overacting.
John Vernon, who was lucky to get any decent role after being typecast as Dean Wormer in Animal House, plays a tyrannical director who invites a group of women to a snowy cabin to try out for a role. There's a lot of bickering and competition between them, and some unfocused detail about motivations for the part. One by one the would-be cast members begin to be murdered.
Reports say there was plenty of dispute on the Curtains set, regarding whether the movie would be a classy thriller or an outright slasher pic. This resulted in delays in production and distribution. Director Richard Ciupka stalked off the set and producer Peter Simpson took over. Simpson won the hearts of slasher fans by producing all the Prom Night movies.
I certainly didn't dislike Curtains, but neither did I love it. It's a disjointed movie that doesn't really come together in a cohesive way. Completest slasher fans should definitely see it, and I think most will enjoy the movie.
Curtains begins and ends with dreamy billowing maroon curtains. Maybe it was a partial inspiration for David Lynch's Blue Velvet.
Rating: 6
January 4: The Majorettes (1986)
Enough with the prestigious productions. Two in a row was enough for now. I was ready to go back to the gutter.
The Majorettes was written by John Russo, and based upon his novel of the same name. There were better movies from the Pittsburgh Posse, like Midnight and Heartstopper (stupidly renamed Dark Craving for the Shriek Show DVD), but The Majorettes isn't half bad. It's not half good either.
I give The Majorettes major points for effort. Russo and Company certainly gave it their all, and there is ample gore and nudity. Unfortunately it's all wrapped up in amateur filmmaking and uninspired performances. The gore isn't very impressive either. Too bad they didn't get hometown boy Tom Savini in to work on this one.
The Majorettes starts off as a generic high school slasher yarn, but Russo's novel went in unexpected places. There are enough twists to qualify for a modern thriller novel. He's known for nihilistic endings, and unlike the watered-down conclusion of Midnight, The Majorettes retains the dark elements of the book.
Someone is murdering high school majorettes, and placing their remains in water. There are a number of red herrings, including a mentally unstable boy and a dope-pushing local hood. There's a lot of lackluster dialogue, but we are here for the gore. The Majorettes delivers in that regard, but the nearly nonexistent budget is a serious deterrent.
I like low budget films and I especially appreciate ones made way outside the studio system. Sometimes it works. Crude production values and nonprofessional actors have resulted in some of the best horror movies ever made. Look at The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Evil Dead, and obviously, Night of the Living Dead. The Majorettes wouldn't even exist without the cultural impact of the latter title.
I don't mean to dump on director Bill Hinzman. He also directed Flesheater. Hinzman is famous for his role as the first zombie in the cemetery in Night of the Living Dead. I think he was mostly having fun with these cheap little productions.
I met Bill Hinzman at a convention once, and he was kind and gracious. I was having a bad weekend for various reasons, and he bought me a beer. I will never forget that.
Bill Hinzman wore a lot of hats in the movies that came in the wake of Night of the Living Dead. Director, actor, producer, editor, cinematographer. For all I know he worked the grill and helped feed the cast and crew on some of them. He died on February 5, 2012. Another icon of horror lost to the ravages of time and mortality. May he rise again one day to reclaim his heritage.
Getting back to The Majorettes, this isn't exactly a slasher milestone and I don't recommend it to any but the staunchest enthusiasts of this particular brand of horror. For those who do watch it, look upon the movie with forgiving eyes, and remember the days before horror was so homogenized and processed, and especially before any fool could use cheap technology to make art.
Rating: 4
January 5: Final Exam (1981)
Final Exam begins with an iconic scene of two lovebirds out parking. A shadowy killer shows up and kills them dead. It's a classic urban legend.
Then for almost an hour the filmmakers forgot they were making a slasher movie.
The movie focuses on frathouse shenanigans and a slight subplot about students on speed.
There's an unnervingly prescient scene where some frat jerks stage a terrorist attack and a mass shooting at the college where Final Exam takes place. It seemed outrageous then, but now it's all too common. As one student told the police:
Senseless murders are a modern phenomenon.
If only they knew how true that would become.
Final Exam has a comfortable collegiate atmosphere, with kids grappling over social tensions, but wasn't there a killer stalking the campus?
Horror fans will relate to a dorky guy with dark obsessions and posters of The Toolbox Murders and The Corpse Grinders on his dorm wall.
It's all pleasant and eventually the killer shows back up for a stalk and slash finale. What makes it interesting is how there is no background or identity attached to the slasher. Too many of these kind of films over-explain the killing spree.
Gorehounds will be disappointed by the lack of graphic effects, but Final Exam is enjoyable enough. The acting is above average for a low budget horror pic, and the dialogue held my interest.
Final Exam was a modest success, but writer-director Jimmy Huston didn't have much of a career. He went on to direct My Best Friend is a Vampire in '87, which to the best of my knowledge was seen by absolutely no one. Huston had a bit of a coup when he co-screenwriter credit on the middling action-buddy comedy Running Scared, with Billy Crystal and Gregory Hines.
Final Exam is strictly midline stuff. It's not intense enough to be a horror classic, nor is it smart and well made as something like Halloween. It's worth a look, but certainly not a keeper.
Rating: 5
January 6: Bloody Moon (1981)
The big financial success of slasher movies cut a swath across the entire planet. Everyone, it seemed, was getting in on the action. The furor even got Jess Franco to step away from his porno-gorno-sleaze formula for one movie.
I'm hardly a Francophile. He made a lot, and I mean a whole lot, of movies. I've seen Faceless, Barbed Wire Dolls, Jack the Ripper, Count Dracula, Oasis of of the Zombies, and Justine. I watched the latter on VHS re-titled as Deadly Sanctuary. It is unbelievably bad. I hear his movies from the nineties on up are even worse.
Bloody Moon (Die Säge des Todes) is one of an astonishing nine, count 'em nine, movies Franco directed in 1981. That's a number that makes even Roger Corman look like a slacker.
This one isn't too bad. The photography is competent and the women are actually fresh-faced and pretty. Quite a departure from some of the other Franco movies.
Franco seemingly was making a half-assed attempt to imitate Halloween and Friday the 13th. It's like a moving paint-by-numbers portrait of a slasher movie. This isn't to say Bloody Moon isn't entertaining. This is rich, pure Eurotrash cinema.
Story? Forget it. There's a lot of nudity, some really cheap gore shots, and a lot of disco music.
It's funny, American disco is enough to make a hard rocker homicidal, but European disco is another matter. It's feels more exotic, more animalistic.
There's sleaze aplenty, but Bloody Moon's crowning achievement, its pièce de résistance, if you will, is a decapitation scene with a large rock-cutting saw. It's too phony to take seriously, but I had a good laugh about it.
What's not to like? Though, I am sorry to say, Bloody Moon isn't going to make me fill my online shopping cart with Jess Franco movies. I like my European horror, hot and rare and seeping with blood, but Franco is both too little and too much for me. Not enough redeeming factors and too much grimy excess. I'll stick with Naschy and de Ossorio for my Spanish horror fixes. Of course if I find any at thrift shop prices, that's another matter. Olé!
Rating: 6
January 7: Student Bodies (1981)
I never cared for the gag-a-minute style of comedy. I saw Airplane! when it played in theaters, laughed a few times, then forgot it. I never liked The Naked Gun, Scary Movie, or Repossessed.
As a slasher fan I was aware of Student Bodies back in '81, but I had less than zero interest. I didn't want to see some goofy-ass farce belittling my beloved movies.
I knew I would watch Student Bodies at some point. I suppose it was a kind of duty I had to fulfill.
Now I've done so. Aaaaand...
Student Bodies is almost exactly what I expected it would be. An irredeemably silly send up of slasher movies. Competently made, but none too clever.
Oh, I chuckled a few times. There are some genuinely funny moments. When you cram so many jokes into a ninety-minute time slot, you are bound to hit the target now and then. Even a stopped clock is right twice a day.
It's all very heavy-handed and labored. They drag out some of jokes, like blatant product placements and onscreen kill count announcements. The killer is named The Breather and he lives up to the title.
I rather enjoyed Student Bodies for a while, but an hour and a half is way too much. Around the halfway point I grew bored. By the end I was ready to start screaming myself.
A promotional tagline of Student Bodies makes this claim:
At last. The world's first comedy horror movie.
I won't even dignify that asinine statement with belaboredly obvious answers.
For horror comedy to work, the horror must be taken seriously, and I need to care about the characters. That's why Fright Night, Night of the Creeps, and Shaun of the Dead succeed. And why Student Bodies does not.
At least I finally watched it. Don't even ask me about Saturday the 14th. It ain't happening.
Rating: 4
January 8: Silent Scream (1981)
Critics were quick to decry Silent Scream as a Halloween ripoff, but the two films are really dissimilar. Silent Scream brings to my mind an early seventies TV movie from Curtis Harrington more than a holiday-themed teenslash picture.
It's obvious from the opening shot that the filmmakers of Silent Scream knew what they were doing. It not only looks professional, it is visually interesting.
Silent Scream was directed by a Denny Harris, who did a damned nice job, but it's his only IMDb credit. What happened is anybody's guess. An internet search revealed nothing.
The plot is fairly basic: A small group of college students rent rooms in a creepy old boarding house. The obligatory murders begin to occur, with all the predictable red herrings. What makes Silent Scream stand out is the filmmaking, the acting, and the effective sound design.
Real actors were brought in for the cast. Veteran character actor Cameron (The Toolbox Murders) is a detective, and his partner is Avery Schreiber. Schreiber was once part of a dunderhead comedy duo no one remembers called Burns and Schreiber. Yvonne DeCarlo, known to generations of sitcom fans as Lily Munster, is an aged matriarch.
I knew the great Barbara Steele was in Silent Scream, but I honestly forgot about it. She shows up about an hour into the movie in a very creepy scene. She's obviously the deranged killer and no one was fooled by the previous false leads.
There's a final twist, but it isn't as outlandish as you'll find in the glut of domestic thrillers around today.
Silent Scream was produced and co-written by Jim and Ken Wheat. These guys weren't the most prolific filmmakers in horror history, but they also wrote The Fly 2, they were uncredited writers on A Nightmare on Elm Street 4, and they also co-wrote Pitch Black. Jim and Ken did a cool little antho picture called After Midnight, in 1989. Unfortunately they also wrote The Birds 2 and, ahem, The Stepford Husbands. Hey, I'm not proud of all the things I've done to earn a living either.
Stylish, suspenseful, and gripping, Silent Scream is the high point of my slasher marathon thus far. The coolest thing about this movie is how it came out before the cliches became tired and there were no slasher rules to follow. All that stuff started with Friday the 13th and Prom Night, which were released half-a-year after Silent Scream.
Rating: 7
January 9: Sleepaway Camp 2: Unhappy Campers (1988)
Five years have gone by. Angela, the world's first trans slasher, is now out of the mental hospital. Pronounced cured and fully transitioned, she is ready to indulge in a new series of campy murders.
She's a little like Terry O'Quinn, from The Stepfather. All poor Angela wants is for her counselors to be good campers with high moral standards. When they fail to comply to her impossibly high standards, she is forced to take drastic measures.
Unlike the unbearably tense atmosphere of The Stepfather, Sleepaway Camp 2: Unhappy Campers is played for comedy. The humor is exceedingly lowbrow, but if you like these kind of movies, it mostly works. While this film is patently absurd, it doesn't stoop to relentless foolishness of Return to Horror High and Student Bodies. Sleepaway Camp 2 functions as a slasher in its own right.
The killings are deliberately cheap-looking, but there's one involving an outhouse and some leeches that takes the crown of the most disgusting and unpleasant killing in slasher history.
Felissa Rose is nowhere to be found in Sleepaway Camp 2. Bruce's sister Pamela Springsteen now takes the role as disturbed Angela. Stunt casting like this shouldn't work as well as it does here. Pamela's performance is flawless. She hits every note and never breaks character. I even hoped the unruly counselors would simply behave so she could be happy.
Renee Estevez is the obligatory good girl. I always liked her and she had a good thing going on in movies like Intruder, Heathers, and Sleepaway Camp 2 and 3. It's too bad her career faded away. Renee continued to play small roles until 2015.
Screenwriter Fritz Gordon had fun with the counselor's names. There's Rob, Molly, Lea, Demi, Emilio, Charlie, Phoebe, Rob, Mare, Judd, Anthony, and Brooke. I chuckled every time I heard a a line like "Have you seen Judd and Anthony?"
Is Sleepaway Camp 2: Unhappy Campers a good movie? Conventional wisdom would say no. I beg to differ. I submit that this movie succeeds in exactly what the filmmakers intended it to do. This movie was not made for the Oscars or to be inducted into the Museum of Modern Art. Sleepaway Camp 2 was conceived for young people to enjoy. I rented the videocassette one afternoon when there was a houseful of other guys hanging out at my house. None but me were horror fans per se, but we all laughed our asses off. If that's not success I don't know what is.
Director Michael A. Simpson and Screenwriter Fritz Gordon also made the similar Sleepaway Camp 3: Teenage Wasteland, also with Pamela Springsteen as Angela. I haven't watched it in decades, but as I remember it isn't quite as good as Sleepaway Camp 2.
Simpson made Fast Food in between these two fine productions, an idiotic farce with Jim "Earnest" Varney. His career quickly wound down afterward. It's a shame. He had a good eye for this kind of sharp parody-horror movie. The early nineties were just ahead, and people were tired of fun little gems like Sleepaway Camp sequels.
A new sequel was made fifteen years later. Sleepaway Camp 4: The Survivor was not received well by fans and to date I have not seen it. The campfire had died down by that point.
Join hands with me and sing along, and for your sake you better be sincere about it:
Oh, I'm a happy camper
I love the summer sun
I love the trees and forest
I'm always having fun
Rating: 8
January 10: Valentine (2001)
In 1996 Scream ushered in new sensibilities to the slasher genre. It was slick, polished, ironic, and filled with TV-pretty people. I liked some of the ones that flowed in its bloody wake: I Know What You Did Last Summer, Urban Legend, Halloween H20, and Idle Hands.
Five years later Urban Legend director Jamie Blanks gave us Valentine. He reportedly apologized for it later.
Half a decade is a blink of the eye by most standards, but by the turn of the century horror audiences were ready for a change.
Valentine made its budget back, but it wasn't enough. We needed the French Extremity movement and the American Torture Porn movies to balance the horror scales. Just as we needed that trend to die down a handful of years later.
Valentine is indeed slick, but it's as empty as an obligatory valentine card from your cousin.
This is standard stuff, with little to derive pleasure from. Denise Richards is the lead and her star was rising at the time, due to popular roles in Starship Troopers, Wild Things, and The World is Not Enough. I honestly never really liked Richards. She has a pretty face, but her features always seemed to have a carved look. I never felt she really brought any of her characters to life.
Valentine is a generic late nineties slasher, one feels too corporate and contrived. There are four screenwriter credits, which indicates a lot of fumbling with the script.
The hip soundtrack feels just as hollow. "Smells Like Teen Spirit" was ten years old and alternative music was fully assimilated by the jaded recording industry. Nu Metal was a blight on the landscape of music in 2001. The songs in Valentine are about as subversive as The Archies.
Valentine ends with yet another stupid plot twist. It isn't surprising or effective in the least.
Slick horror movies continued to be released, such as the cartoonish productions from Dark Castle Entertainment and seemingly endless bland remakes that merely tainted the legacy of movies like The Fog, The House on Sorority Row, April Fool's Day, Black Christmas, The Grudge, and When a Stranger Calls. Horror fans like me were hungry for something new.
We got it in High Tension, Hostel, The Collector, Inside, House of 1,000 Corpses, Saw, Martyrs, and even good remakes like The Hills Have Eyes, I Spit on Your Grave, and Funny Games.
Now we're back with hip horror movies for the masses. Until Dawn; the latest Final Destination; another I Know What You Did; Silent Night, Deadly Night; and Clown in a Cornfield. I didn't hate any of these, but I am grateful for the cool independent horror we've been seeing.
Valentine is a relic of a transitional time in horror, when our hearts were breaking and we needed new love.
Rating: 3
January 11: Killer Workout (1986)
I am big enough to admit when I am wrong. It's happened often enough over the years. I've made bad predictions, erroneous statements, spelling and grammar mistakes. This month I made a grave error. I naively believed I wouldn't see a worse slasher movie than The Mutilator 2.
If you plumb enough horror pillars, if you delve into the deepest mines, it's inevitable that you hit rock bottom. I've done so with Killer Workout.
I can't think of one good thing to say about this one. It's rotten from the corrupt inside to the repugnant outer core. Killer Workout isn't an effort by cool people to make a fun horror movie. I can at least say that about Mutilator 2. Those clowns at least meant well.
Killer Workout is a miserably cynical assault on the good horror genre to make a few dollars. I can't find budgetary information about it, but I know this much: I was a member of numerous video stores in the eighties. I never once saw the tape on the shelves. Believe me, I scoured every horror title at every store I entered. Killer Workout certainly didn't play in theaters near me.
I assume the producers felt that a lot of exercise scenes with scantily-clad women and their augmented breasts would pass as entertainment. Sorry boys, most of us require a little more effort that that.
There are a hoard of vapid women and dopey guys all trying to get skinny. The thinnest thing in the movie is the story.
A woman is basted in a tanning booth. Covered with unsightly burns everywhere but her face, she uses a large safety pin to exact jealous revenge on the beautiful women in the spa.
Martha Karr is the star. She had bit parts in better movies like Chained Heat, Hardbodies, Savage Streets, and Real Genius. Her biggest credit is in The Entity, where she was Barbara Hershey's body double. I don't blame Karr. I'm sure she gave it her best shot.
The real culprits are the Prior Brothers, David and Ted. They produced, directed, and starred in bottom of the barrel action and horror movies that you probably have not seen. You're better off that way. David wrote and directed Killer Workout, though I'd like to get a look at what passed for a screenplay. Ted plays a dimwitted lunkhead cop trying to solve the gym murders.
If that isn't bad enough, the print used in Slasher Vision's DVD is atrocious. They give the obligatory disclaimer, best possible sources, every effort was made, blah blah blah. Who would bother to restore this toxic smoothie of a movie?
Unless you are like me and are foolish enough to try to watch every slasher movie ever made, do yourself a big, big favor and skip the gym and stay away from Killer Workout.
Rating: 1
January 12: Scream 2 (1997)
Kevin Williamson is Scream and Scream is Kevin Williamson. Scream is Williamson's baby, even more so than Wes Craven's. The best movies in the franchise are written by Kevin. Part 3, written by Ehren (No relation to Freddy) Krueger, sucks, and Williamson returned in the far superior Part 4. Five and Six were popular for a new generation, but the Scream spirit wasn't quite there. At least not for long term fans like me.
Kevin Williamson is back for the upcoming Scream 7. This time he will have the director's chair as well as being co-writer of the screenplay. Fingers are crossed and hopes are cautiously high.
The first Scream was obviously a huge hit. Craven needed it and we needed it as well. There was a backlash among so-called serious horror fans, but I love Scream. I think the slick production and camera-friendly stars belie a truly subversive nature. Plus, like these movies or not, you have to admit Kevin Williamson is a real fan of slasher movies and he put his heart into them.
I don't even harbor much of a grudge against him for Teaching Mrs. Tingle. Williamson was up against a lot of pressure in the wake of the Columbine massacre at the time.
Scream 2 was released almost exactly one year after the first movie. That's often a bad sign. Picture Friday the 13th's Crazy Ralph: "It’s got a death curse! You're doomed! You're all doomed!”
No, Scream 2 is a worthy followup. Once more there’s a strong tongue-in-cheek tone This time a lot of it is toward inferior sequels, which is a fate Scream 2 escaped.
One of the things that makes the Scream movies work is the charismatic characters. I really like Sydney Prescott, , Gale Weathers, and especially the most beloved peace officer since Dale Cooper descended upon Twin Peaks, Deputy Dewey.
Sydney and horror nerd survivor Randy Meeks are now in college. A movie from the events of the first movie, called Stab, is released, and now a copycat killer is on the loose. Sydney is getting phone calls again and attractive young people are being slaughtered. Gale and Dewey are back to help solve the mystery.
Once again Williamson injects a lot of movie trivia in the movie. There are visual nods to Carrie and Dario Argento and, really, you could devote a lot of time discovering them all.
The revelation is a little silly, but Scream 2 is another critic-proof movie. You see, this is a parody of horror sequels! Of course it’s far-fetched! Like all good parodies, it succeeds both as a comedy and a genuine horror movie.
It’s kind of sad that Wes Craven got stuck doing Scream movies. The first was, I’m sure, a great experience for him. I’d also bet he had a good time making the others, but Wes wanted to do so much more. He got his wish, thanks to the success of the franchise, when he was able to direct Music of the Heart in 1999. It was back to Scream after that, as well as unsatisfying experiences on Cursed and My Soul to Take. At least Red Eye turned out okay.
Scream 2 is a nice trip back to the late nineties. The music is mostly enjoyable and the franchise hadn’t grown tired yet. Craven certainly understood camera angles and mood and suspense. Honestly, I think this is one of his best works.
I was at my last checkup and my doctor and I were talking for a few moments afterward. She said her daughter is doing great, but she is obsessed with this Ghostface character. Had I heard of the Scream movies? I smiled. Yes, you might say I am aware of them.
Rating: 8
January 13: The Initiation (1984)
It's one of the biggest regrets of my life. I never went to college. I wanted to, but there was no chance for me. Not without the kind of help I needed. I had no idea how to find it.
I did get invited to some college parties by friends of mine. They were disappointing experiences. The kids weren't discussing Fellini and Vonnegut, as I hoped. No, the parties were filled with loud, arrogant, rich brats. Much like the cast of The Initiation.
Daphne Zuniga started off her career on the right foot. Her first credit was in the above-average slasher, The Dorm That Dripped Blood. Then came The Initiation. She also appeared in the Ill-fated The Fly 2. Soon enough Zuniga was cast in the nighttime soapy hit series Melrose Place. Her fate was sealed after that. Come home, Daphne. Horror is always here waiting with open arms.
Ms. Zuniga got her first top billing in The Initiation as Kelly Fairchild. That was a harbinger of things to come. Fairchild is the perfect stereotype last name for an evening soap opera character.
Kelly had a traumatic experience as a child and now suffers amnesia about the event. Her parents, played by Hollywood vets Clu Gulager and Vera Miles, are obviously harboring a secret about it.
Daph is unwisely joining a frat and has to break into her father's monolithic department store as a hazing prank. She and her dimwit friends begin getting bumped off in the typical ways. Gore isn't the point here. I'm actually not sure what the point was.
The Initiation doesn't quite function as a horror movie, but there's too much death for its melodramatic heart. The students are mostly blithering idiots, cluelessly stumbling around as the death count increases. Working class people would have handled it a lot better.
Yes, there's a big, hairy twist at the end, which reminded me a bit of the vastly superior Happy Birthday To Me.
There's a blow-dried grad student who studies dreams, his goofy assistant, the requisite mean girl, and a bunch of dumber-than-usual dudes. There's actually one interesting character and situation. A repressed co-ed confesses to being molested at a young age. It's the only moment of real emotion in the entire running time of The Initiation.
There must be a subgenre of slasher movies that relates to soap operas. The screenwriter of Curtains was a longtime writer on General Hospital. The Initiation was written by Charles Pratt, Jr. He wrote for, let me catch my breath, General Hospital, Melrose Place, All My Children, The Young and the Restless, Beverly Hills 90210, Models Inc, and Ugly Betty. Not exactly a horror-centric resume.
The Initiation was once available on an Anchor Bay double feature DVD, along with Mountaintop Motel Massacre. The latter is an infinitely better movie. I just watched The Initiation on the lousy VHS-quality DVD from Image Entertainment, as part of their Midnight Madness Series.
Rating: 4
January 14: The Final Terror (1983)
Deliverance is obviously the gold standard of wilderness survival movies. My favorite in the low budget realm is Rituals, with Hal Holbrook.
The Final Terror falls short of those classics, but it's a pretty good movie.
There was a lot of talent in The Final Terror, both in front and behind the camera. This was the second feature from Andrew Davis, who had major hits with Under Siege and The Fugitive. Co-screenwriter Ronald Shusett previously had a story credit on Alien. He also wrote Dead and Buried and King Kong Lives, before working on Steven Seagal's first few movies. Shusett later contributed to Minority Report, Total Recall, Freejack, and Alien Vs. Predator. Not all classics, surely, but lucrative jobs in the big Hollywood machine.
The Final Terror was produced by Joe Roth, who went on to the highest hierarchy in show business. In addition to producing a lot of huge hits, Roth was the studio chief of Disney for six years. I'll always think fondly of Roth as the producer of Ladies and Gentlemen, the Fabulous Stains.
Rachel Ward is in The Final Terror. So is Daryl Hannah. Hannah isn't bad, but you'd never guess she would become a superstar a few years later.
If all that isn't enough, the Samuel Z. Arkoff seal of approval is at the beginning of the credits.
The Final Terror was shot in the heart the of the slasher genre, in the hallowed year of 1981. It failed to find a distributor until two years later, which definitely hurt its chances for success.
As for the movie, The Final Terror is a grim and effective story of a group of campers who descend into the deep wilderness. A grisly campfire story is told, but there's more than a grain of truth about it.
I love the way the cast is in dire jeopardy but stops to light joints throughout the movie. One even trips on mushrooms!
Though there is some professional stunt work in The Final Terror, the cast put themselves in a lot of dangerous situations. This gives the movie a greater degree of realism than in most of these type of stories.
The Final Terror didn't get the exposure it should have received, but it was still influential. I'm pretty sure the makers of Wrong Turn drew inspiration from this one.
It's nice to end my slasher marathon with something this good. I recommend The Final Terror to anyone interested in these kind of movies.
Rating: 8
Cut and print! That's a wrap!
I don't want anything to think I had a bad time watching these. Despite my many criticisms, I rather like them all. Except for Killer Workout. Back in the days of the drive-in, we took the good with the bad and the in-between. We had a great time with all of 'em.
I like to think I am maintaining the tradition. My old friends are mostly dead. Literally or figuratively. My best movie buddy died a few years ago and I will always miss him. I keep him in my heart as I watch these movies. Other friends have grown old. Not just in years, but in their minds and hearts. They can't take slasher and other types of horror anymore. I sort of get it. I can't take the superhero and cheesy action movies they watch.
If you've stuck with me this far, thanks. I'm sure you need a break as well as I do. I may not watch another slasher movie until next January.
Ah, who am I fooling. I'll watch some independent dramas, some foreign movies, some comedies, but before long I'll be back to the dead teenagers, the soulless killers, the knives, the garrotes, the hooks and the spikes.
Death is out there, but for now he's still a long way off. Let's have some fun before the killer strikes again.
Media vita in morte sumus (In the midst of life, we are in death)
-A Gregorian Chant
Written by Mark Sieber
Allow me to elaborate. I was seventeen when John Carpenter's Halloween was released. It is, to me, the ideal age to first experience the movie. I know a lot of fans grew up with slasher movies on VHS or DVD, but there was no home video to speak of back in 1978.
I already loved horror, but Halloween was something altogether different. It was a new kind of horror movie for a new generation. I was the exact target audience for it.
I knew Halloween was a masterpiece that would never be topped. It's that rare thing, a perfect movie. I wouldn't change a nanosecond.
Halloween was a big part of my transition from child to adult. As were all the slashers to follow. They suited my rebellious nature, but there was something primal in even the worst of the movies.
Most of us begin to know death by the time we reach adulthood. It was a hazy concept before that for me, but I started to know people who died. Family, neighbors, friends. Death became as real as the air I breathed and the water that sustained me.
Slasher movies reminded me that death was inevitable and could strike at any moment. It's coming, ambling along in a slow but determined stride. I could run all I liked, but death is persistent.
I could die today. A car accident, some bad food, a trip down a flight of stairs, anything could happen. However, I am alive right now. That's all that matters and that's all we have to work with.
If I am going to die someday, I will enjoy myself today. My joy is horror movies and books. Other things too, of course, but horror has always been the main thrust of my life.
I came into adulthood with slasher movies, I am entering my old age with them. Perhaps I'll die while watching one. There are worse fates.
So here I am, two weeks into 2026. I picked fourteen slasher movies, some I've seen, and some I missed. I hope you enjoy my little slasher festival.
January 1: The Mutilator 2 (2023)
There's one good thing about starting my annual New Year's slasher marathon with The Mutilator 2. Simply put, every other movie ahead will be better.
I hate to be too hard on something like this, where the people involved seem cool and were obviously having a great time. Still, I can't recommend The Mutilator 2 to anyone.
The Mutilator is a fun little slasher opus that came in as the first cycle was winding down. It's not the best, but I like it a lot. Part of it is due to fond memories of seeing The Mutilator along with Massacre at Central High at a drive-in back in '84. The movie has some choice effects from Mark Shostrum. The Mutilator is a good example of independent slasher cinema from another era.
Director Buddy Cooper threatened to unleash a sequel to The Mutilator nearly forty years after the first one. I wasn't especially enthused, but in the end I bought a DVD. I didn't expect much, and in that regard The Mutilator 2 was not a disappointment.
Taking a cue from the requel/re-imagining/legacy 2014 version of The Town That Dreaded Sundown, The Mutilator 2 reunites the the cast from the original movie, and has them appear in a sequel. It's being made in the same location, Atlantic Beach, North Carolina.
This is a silly, painfully unfunny slasher comedy. The jokes are weak, the effects are hopelessly amateur, and the performances are woeful.
It's a little like Hollywood Boulevard 2, only that one makes fun of things like The Mutilator 2. Plus Hollywood Boulevard 2 is genuinely funny.
As for the so-called story, a sequel to The Mutilator is in production, but someone is slaughtering people on the set. Terry Kiser, from the unforgivable Weekend at Bernie's, joins the cast. He's supremely unlikable, with a smug attitude and obnoxious screen presence.
The Mutilator 2 is a painful experience, with little to offer the seasoned slasher fan or the novice viewer. The movie trudges along, and the best surprise is when it abruptly and mercifully ends, with no revelation or conclusion.
There were a couple of nice second unit shots of the beach at nighttime. That's about all the praise I can come up with.
The victims wave to the cast in the end credits, just like in The Undertaker and His Pals, showing us it was all in good fun. Believe it or not, The Mutilator 2 is an even worse film.
I knew better, but I spent good, hard American dollars to see this meta-mess. Don't you make the same mistake.
Rating: 2
January 2: Night School (1981)
Night School didn't make a big ripple in the slasher pond back in 1981. It's a very well made movie, much more professional than most others of its kind. However, slasher fans wanted partying kids and young adults, wild situations and abundant murders, not boring mature grown ups.
Night School resembles a classy giallo movie. Change the language and the locations and it could have Sergio Martino's name in the credits. It's all a bit too stodgy for an American slasher movie of its day.
This was the final movie from director Kenneth Hughes. What a comedown from the man who made Of Human Bondage and, for God's sake, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.
Night School doesn't quite work as a truly prestigious film, nor as a down and dirty slice-and-dice. It's slow and laborious, with most of the violence offscreen.
Women students are being beheaded in the city of Boston. They all attend Wendall College, or are at least affiliated with it. An anthropology professor who likes to dally with his students is a likely candidate for the killer. The murders are done in the style of New Guinea tribal ceremonies. The heads must be removed and then places in some sort of water.
There's a nice scene where a noggin floats down into a large public aquarium. Night School's scene of a head discovered in a toilet bowl beat a similar moment in The House on Sorority Row by a year.
There's too much attention on bland police activity and not enough focus on the meat of the matter. There's a dumb and an inconclusive ending, wide open for another movie. Did they think Night School would be popular enough for a sequel?
Paramount made big bank from the Friday the 13th franchise, but they were still trying to figure out how these degenerate slasher movies worked. Old time Hollywood directors were not the right choice to make them.
Rating: 5
January 3: Curtains (1983)
Curtains was difficult to see before Synapse Films rescued it from obscurity. It's a decent movie, but we wouldn't be out too much if it had remained lost.
Quite a few good slasher movies came out of Canada, including classics like My Bloody Valentine, Prom Night, The Burning, Terror Train, and Black Christmas. Curtains is a fairly late entry in the first wave of the genre. Like a lot of slashers, it has strong giallo roots, but Curtains is closer to Agatha Christie than Mario Bava. It was written by Robert Guza Jr., who later became the head writer of TV soap General Hospital. The melodramatic tone of Curtains shows he was right for the job. And wrong for horror.
Curtains is largely a bloodless movie, with most of its violence offscreen. There's a creepy hag mask that's very effective. A scene where the killer skates across an icy lake bearing a sickle is the best moment in the film.
You get an ominous mannequin that looks straight out of Profondo Rosso, yet another head found in a toilet bowl, and Samantha Eggar going for the Joan Crawford Award for Overacting.
John Vernon, who was lucky to get any decent role after being typecast as Dean Wormer in Animal House, plays a tyrannical director who invites a group of women to a snowy cabin to try out for a role. There's a lot of bickering and competition between them, and some unfocused detail about motivations for the part. One by one the would-be cast members begin to be murdered.
Reports say there was plenty of dispute on the Curtains set, regarding whether the movie would be a classy thriller or an outright slasher pic. This resulted in delays in production and distribution. Director Richard Ciupka stalked off the set and producer Peter Simpson took over. Simpson won the hearts of slasher fans by producing all the Prom Night movies.
I certainly didn't dislike Curtains, but neither did I love it. It's a disjointed movie that doesn't really come together in a cohesive way. Completest slasher fans should definitely see it, and I think most will enjoy the movie.
Curtains begins and ends with dreamy billowing maroon curtains. Maybe it was a partial inspiration for David Lynch's Blue Velvet.
Rating: 6
January 4: The Majorettes (1986)
Enough with the prestigious productions. Two in a row was enough for now. I was ready to go back to the gutter.
The Majorettes was written by John Russo, and based upon his novel of the same name. There were better movies from the Pittsburgh Posse, like Midnight and Heartstopper (stupidly renamed Dark Craving for the Shriek Show DVD), but The Majorettes isn't half bad. It's not half good either.
I give The Majorettes major points for effort. Russo and Company certainly gave it their all, and there is ample gore and nudity. Unfortunately it's all wrapped up in amateur filmmaking and uninspired performances. The gore isn't very impressive either. Too bad they didn't get hometown boy Tom Savini in to work on this one.
The Majorettes starts off as a generic high school slasher yarn, but Russo's novel went in unexpected places. There are enough twists to qualify for a modern thriller novel. He's known for nihilistic endings, and unlike the watered-down conclusion of Midnight, The Majorettes retains the dark elements of the book.
Someone is murdering high school majorettes, and placing their remains in water. There are a number of red herrings, including a mentally unstable boy and a dope-pushing local hood. There's a lot of lackluster dialogue, but we are here for the gore. The Majorettes delivers in that regard, but the nearly nonexistent budget is a serious deterrent.
I like low budget films and I especially appreciate ones made way outside the studio system. Sometimes it works. Crude production values and nonprofessional actors have resulted in some of the best horror movies ever made. Look at The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Evil Dead, and obviously, Night of the Living Dead. The Majorettes wouldn't even exist without the cultural impact of the latter title.
I don't mean to dump on director Bill Hinzman. He also directed Flesheater. Hinzman is famous for his role as the first zombie in the cemetery in Night of the Living Dead. I think he was mostly having fun with these cheap little productions.
I met Bill Hinzman at a convention once, and he was kind and gracious. I was having a bad weekend for various reasons, and he bought me a beer. I will never forget that.
Bill Hinzman wore a lot of hats in the movies that came in the wake of Night of the Living Dead. Director, actor, producer, editor, cinematographer. For all I know he worked the grill and helped feed the cast and crew on some of them. He died on February 5, 2012. Another icon of horror lost to the ravages of time and mortality. May he rise again one day to reclaim his heritage.
Getting back to The Majorettes, this isn't exactly a slasher milestone and I don't recommend it to any but the staunchest enthusiasts of this particular brand of horror. For those who do watch it, look upon the movie with forgiving eyes, and remember the days before horror was so homogenized and processed, and especially before any fool could use cheap technology to make art.
Rating: 4
January 5: Final Exam (1981)
Final Exam begins with an iconic scene of two lovebirds out parking. A shadowy killer shows up and kills them dead. It's a classic urban legend.
Then for almost an hour the filmmakers forgot they were making a slasher movie.
The movie focuses on frathouse shenanigans and a slight subplot about students on speed.
There's an unnervingly prescient scene where some frat jerks stage a terrorist attack and a mass shooting at the college where Final Exam takes place. It seemed outrageous then, but now it's all too common. As one student told the police:
Senseless murders are a modern phenomenon.
If only they knew how true that would become.
Final Exam has a comfortable collegiate atmosphere, with kids grappling over social tensions, but wasn't there a killer stalking the campus?
Horror fans will relate to a dorky guy with dark obsessions and posters of The Toolbox Murders and The Corpse Grinders on his dorm wall.
It's all pleasant and eventually the killer shows back up for a stalk and slash finale. What makes it interesting is how there is no background or identity attached to the slasher. Too many of these kind of films over-explain the killing spree.
Gorehounds will be disappointed by the lack of graphic effects, but Final Exam is enjoyable enough. The acting is above average for a low budget horror pic, and the dialogue held my interest.
Final Exam was a modest success, but writer-director Jimmy Huston didn't have much of a career. He went on to direct My Best Friend is a Vampire in '87, which to the best of my knowledge was seen by absolutely no one. Huston had a bit of a coup when he co-screenwriter credit on the middling action-buddy comedy Running Scared, with Billy Crystal and Gregory Hines.
Final Exam is strictly midline stuff. It's not intense enough to be a horror classic, nor is it smart and well made as something like Halloween. It's worth a look, but certainly not a keeper.
Rating: 5
January 6: Bloody Moon (1981)
The big financial success of slasher movies cut a swath across the entire planet. Everyone, it seemed, was getting in on the action. The furor even got Jess Franco to step away from his porno-gorno-sleaze formula for one movie.
I'm hardly a Francophile. He made a lot, and I mean a whole lot, of movies. I've seen Faceless, Barbed Wire Dolls, Jack the Ripper, Count Dracula, Oasis of of the Zombies, and Justine. I watched the latter on VHS re-titled as Deadly Sanctuary. It is unbelievably bad. I hear his movies from the nineties on up are even worse.
Bloody Moon (Die Säge des Todes) is one of an astonishing nine, count 'em nine, movies Franco directed in 1981. That's a number that makes even Roger Corman look like a slacker.
This one isn't too bad. The photography is competent and the women are actually fresh-faced and pretty. Quite a departure from some of the other Franco movies.
Franco seemingly was making a half-assed attempt to imitate Halloween and Friday the 13th. It's like a moving paint-by-numbers portrait of a slasher movie. This isn't to say Bloody Moon isn't entertaining. This is rich, pure Eurotrash cinema.
Story? Forget it. There's a lot of nudity, some really cheap gore shots, and a lot of disco music.
It's funny, American disco is enough to make a hard rocker homicidal, but European disco is another matter. It's feels more exotic, more animalistic.
There's sleaze aplenty, but Bloody Moon's crowning achievement, its pièce de résistance, if you will, is a decapitation scene with a large rock-cutting saw. It's too phony to take seriously, but I had a good laugh about it.
What's not to like? Though, I am sorry to say, Bloody Moon isn't going to make me fill my online shopping cart with Jess Franco movies. I like my European horror, hot and rare and seeping with blood, but Franco is both too little and too much for me. Not enough redeeming factors and too much grimy excess. I'll stick with Naschy and de Ossorio for my Spanish horror fixes. Of course if I find any at thrift shop prices, that's another matter. Olé!
Rating: 6
January 7: Student Bodies (1981)
I never cared for the gag-a-minute style of comedy. I saw Airplane! when it played in theaters, laughed a few times, then forgot it. I never liked The Naked Gun, Scary Movie, or Repossessed.
As a slasher fan I was aware of Student Bodies back in '81, but I had less than zero interest. I didn't want to see some goofy-ass farce belittling my beloved movies.
I knew I would watch Student Bodies at some point. I suppose it was a kind of duty I had to fulfill.
Now I've done so. Aaaaand...
Student Bodies is almost exactly what I expected it would be. An irredeemably silly send up of slasher movies. Competently made, but none too clever.
Oh, I chuckled a few times. There are some genuinely funny moments. When you cram so many jokes into a ninety-minute time slot, you are bound to hit the target now and then. Even a stopped clock is right twice a day.
It's all very heavy-handed and labored. They drag out some of jokes, like blatant product placements and onscreen kill count announcements. The killer is named The Breather and he lives up to the title.
I rather enjoyed Student Bodies for a while, but an hour and a half is way too much. Around the halfway point I grew bored. By the end I was ready to start screaming myself.
A promotional tagline of Student Bodies makes this claim:
At last. The world's first comedy horror movie.
I won't even dignify that asinine statement with belaboredly obvious answers.
For horror comedy to work, the horror must be taken seriously, and I need to care about the characters. That's why Fright Night, Night of the Creeps, and Shaun of the Dead succeed. And why Student Bodies does not.
At least I finally watched it. Don't even ask me about Saturday the 14th. It ain't happening.
Rating: 4
January 8: Silent Scream (1981)
Critics were quick to decry Silent Scream as a Halloween ripoff, but the two films are really dissimilar. Silent Scream brings to my mind an early seventies TV movie from Curtis Harrington more than a holiday-themed teenslash picture.
It's obvious from the opening shot that the filmmakers of Silent Scream knew what they were doing. It not only looks professional, it is visually interesting.
Silent Scream was directed by a Denny Harris, who did a damned nice job, but it's his only IMDb credit. What happened is anybody's guess. An internet search revealed nothing.
The plot is fairly basic: A small group of college students rent rooms in a creepy old boarding house. The obligatory murders begin to occur, with all the predictable red herrings. What makes Silent Scream stand out is the filmmaking, the acting, and the effective sound design.
Real actors were brought in for the cast. Veteran character actor Cameron (The Toolbox Murders) is a detective, and his partner is Avery Schreiber. Schreiber was once part of a dunderhead comedy duo no one remembers called Burns and Schreiber. Yvonne DeCarlo, known to generations of sitcom fans as Lily Munster, is an aged matriarch.
I knew the great Barbara Steele was in Silent Scream, but I honestly forgot about it. She shows up about an hour into the movie in a very creepy scene. She's obviously the deranged killer and no one was fooled by the previous false leads.
There's a final twist, but it isn't as outlandish as you'll find in the glut of domestic thrillers around today.
Silent Scream was produced and co-written by Jim and Ken Wheat. These guys weren't the most prolific filmmakers in horror history, but they also wrote The Fly 2, they were uncredited writers on A Nightmare on Elm Street 4, and they also co-wrote Pitch Black. Jim and Ken did a cool little antho picture called After Midnight, in 1989. Unfortunately they also wrote The Birds 2 and, ahem, The Stepford Husbands. Hey, I'm not proud of all the things I've done to earn a living either.
Stylish, suspenseful, and gripping, Silent Scream is the high point of my slasher marathon thus far. The coolest thing about this movie is how it came out before the cliches became tired and there were no slasher rules to follow. All that stuff started with Friday the 13th and Prom Night, which were released half-a-year after Silent Scream.
Rating: 7
January 9: Sleepaway Camp 2: Unhappy Campers (1988)
Five years have gone by. Angela, the world's first trans slasher, is now out of the mental hospital. Pronounced cured and fully transitioned, she is ready to indulge in a new series of campy murders.
She's a little like Terry O'Quinn, from The Stepfather. All poor Angela wants is for her counselors to be good campers with high moral standards. When they fail to comply to her impossibly high standards, she is forced to take drastic measures.
Unlike the unbearably tense atmosphere of The Stepfather, Sleepaway Camp 2: Unhappy Campers is played for comedy. The humor is exceedingly lowbrow, but if you like these kind of movies, it mostly works. While this film is patently absurd, it doesn't stoop to relentless foolishness of Return to Horror High and Student Bodies. Sleepaway Camp 2 functions as a slasher in its own right.
The killings are deliberately cheap-looking, but there's one involving an outhouse and some leeches that takes the crown of the most disgusting and unpleasant killing in slasher history.
Felissa Rose is nowhere to be found in Sleepaway Camp 2. Bruce's sister Pamela Springsteen now takes the role as disturbed Angela. Stunt casting like this shouldn't work as well as it does here. Pamela's performance is flawless. She hits every note and never breaks character. I even hoped the unruly counselors would simply behave so she could be happy.
Renee Estevez is the obligatory good girl. I always liked her and she had a good thing going on in movies like Intruder, Heathers, and Sleepaway Camp 2 and 3. It's too bad her career faded away. Renee continued to play small roles until 2015.
Screenwriter Fritz Gordon had fun with the counselor's names. There's Rob, Molly, Lea, Demi, Emilio, Charlie, Phoebe, Rob, Mare, Judd, Anthony, and Brooke. I chuckled every time I heard a a line like "Have you seen Judd and Anthony?"
Is Sleepaway Camp 2: Unhappy Campers a good movie? Conventional wisdom would say no. I beg to differ. I submit that this movie succeeds in exactly what the filmmakers intended it to do. This movie was not made for the Oscars or to be inducted into the Museum of Modern Art. Sleepaway Camp 2 was conceived for young people to enjoy. I rented the videocassette one afternoon when there was a houseful of other guys hanging out at my house. None but me were horror fans per se, but we all laughed our asses off. If that's not success I don't know what is.
Director Michael A. Simpson and Screenwriter Fritz Gordon also made the similar Sleepaway Camp 3: Teenage Wasteland, also with Pamela Springsteen as Angela. I haven't watched it in decades, but as I remember it isn't quite as good as Sleepaway Camp 2.
Simpson made Fast Food in between these two fine productions, an idiotic farce with Jim "Earnest" Varney. His career quickly wound down afterward. It's a shame. He had a good eye for this kind of sharp parody-horror movie. The early nineties were just ahead, and people were tired of fun little gems like Sleepaway Camp sequels.
A new sequel was made fifteen years later. Sleepaway Camp 4: The Survivor was not received well by fans and to date I have not seen it. The campfire had died down by that point.
Join hands with me and sing along, and for your sake you better be sincere about it:
Oh, I'm a happy camper
I love the summer sun
I love the trees and forest
I'm always having fun
Rating: 8
January 10: Valentine (2001)
In 1996 Scream ushered in new sensibilities to the slasher genre. It was slick, polished, ironic, and filled with TV-pretty people. I liked some of the ones that flowed in its bloody wake: I Know What You Did Last Summer, Urban Legend, Halloween H20, and Idle Hands.
Five years later Urban Legend director Jamie Blanks gave us Valentine. He reportedly apologized for it later.
Half a decade is a blink of the eye by most standards, but by the turn of the century horror audiences were ready for a change.
Valentine made its budget back, but it wasn't enough. We needed the French Extremity movement and the American Torture Porn movies to balance the horror scales. Just as we needed that trend to die down a handful of years later.
Valentine is indeed slick, but it's as empty as an obligatory valentine card from your cousin.
This is standard stuff, with little to derive pleasure from. Denise Richards is the lead and her star was rising at the time, due to popular roles in Starship Troopers, Wild Things, and The World is Not Enough. I honestly never really liked Richards. She has a pretty face, but her features always seemed to have a carved look. I never felt she really brought any of her characters to life.
Valentine is a generic late nineties slasher, one feels too corporate and contrived. There are four screenwriter credits, which indicates a lot of fumbling with the script.
The hip soundtrack feels just as hollow. "Smells Like Teen Spirit" was ten years old and alternative music was fully assimilated by the jaded recording industry. Nu Metal was a blight on the landscape of music in 2001. The songs in Valentine are about as subversive as The Archies.
Valentine ends with yet another stupid plot twist. It isn't surprising or effective in the least.
Slick horror movies continued to be released, such as the cartoonish productions from Dark Castle Entertainment and seemingly endless bland remakes that merely tainted the legacy of movies like The Fog, The House on Sorority Row, April Fool's Day, Black Christmas, The Grudge, and When a Stranger Calls. Horror fans like me were hungry for something new.
We got it in High Tension, Hostel, The Collector, Inside, House of 1,000 Corpses, Saw, Martyrs, and even good remakes like The Hills Have Eyes, I Spit on Your Grave, and Funny Games.
Now we're back with hip horror movies for the masses. Until Dawn; the latest Final Destination; another I Know What You Did; Silent Night, Deadly Night; and Clown in a Cornfield. I didn't hate any of these, but I am grateful for the cool independent horror we've been seeing.
Valentine is a relic of a transitional time in horror, when our hearts were breaking and we needed new love.
Rating: 3
January 11: Killer Workout (1986)
I am big enough to admit when I am wrong. It's happened often enough over the years. I've made bad predictions, erroneous statements, spelling and grammar mistakes. This month I made a grave error. I naively believed I wouldn't see a worse slasher movie than The Mutilator 2.
If you plumb enough horror pillars, if you delve into the deepest mines, it's inevitable that you hit rock bottom. I've done so with Killer Workout.
I can't think of one good thing to say about this one. It's rotten from the corrupt inside to the repugnant outer core. Killer Workout isn't an effort by cool people to make a fun horror movie. I can at least say that about Mutilator 2. Those clowns at least meant well.
Killer Workout is a miserably cynical assault on the good horror genre to make a few dollars. I can't find budgetary information about it, but I know this much: I was a member of numerous video stores in the eighties. I never once saw the tape on the shelves. Believe me, I scoured every horror title at every store I entered. Killer Workout certainly didn't play in theaters near me.
I assume the producers felt that a lot of exercise scenes with scantily-clad women and their augmented breasts would pass as entertainment. Sorry boys, most of us require a little more effort that that.
There are a hoard of vapid women and dopey guys all trying to get skinny. The thinnest thing in the movie is the story.
A woman is basted in a tanning booth. Covered with unsightly burns everywhere but her face, she uses a large safety pin to exact jealous revenge on the beautiful women in the spa.
Martha Karr is the star. She had bit parts in better movies like Chained Heat, Hardbodies, Savage Streets, and Real Genius. Her biggest credit is in The Entity, where she was Barbara Hershey's body double. I don't blame Karr. I'm sure she gave it her best shot.
The real culprits are the Prior Brothers, David and Ted. They produced, directed, and starred in bottom of the barrel action and horror movies that you probably have not seen. You're better off that way. David wrote and directed Killer Workout, though I'd like to get a look at what passed for a screenplay. Ted plays a dimwitted lunkhead cop trying to solve the gym murders.
If that isn't bad enough, the print used in Slasher Vision's DVD is atrocious. They give the obligatory disclaimer, best possible sources, every effort was made, blah blah blah. Who would bother to restore this toxic smoothie of a movie?
Unless you are like me and are foolish enough to try to watch every slasher movie ever made, do yourself a big, big favor and skip the gym and stay away from Killer Workout.
Rating: 1
January 12: Scream 2 (1997)
Kevin Williamson is Scream and Scream is Kevin Williamson. Scream is Williamson's baby, even more so than Wes Craven's. The best movies in the franchise are written by Kevin. Part 3, written by Ehren (No relation to Freddy) Krueger, sucks, and Williamson returned in the far superior Part 4. Five and Six were popular for a new generation, but the Scream spirit wasn't quite there. At least not for long term fans like me.
Kevin Williamson is back for the upcoming Scream 7. This time he will have the director's chair as well as being co-writer of the screenplay. Fingers are crossed and hopes are cautiously high.
The first Scream was obviously a huge hit. Craven needed it and we needed it as well. There was a backlash among so-called serious horror fans, but I love Scream. I think the slick production and camera-friendly stars belie a truly subversive nature. Plus, like these movies or not, you have to admit Kevin Williamson is a real fan of slasher movies and he put his heart into them.
I don't even harbor much of a grudge against him for Teaching Mrs. Tingle. Williamson was up against a lot of pressure in the wake of the Columbine massacre at the time.
Scream 2 was released almost exactly one year after the first movie. That's often a bad sign. Picture Friday the 13th's Crazy Ralph: "It’s got a death curse! You're doomed! You're all doomed!”
No, Scream 2 is a worthy followup. Once more there’s a strong tongue-in-cheek tone This time a lot of it is toward inferior sequels, which is a fate Scream 2 escaped.
One of the things that makes the Scream movies work is the charismatic characters. I really like Sydney Prescott, , Gale Weathers, and especially the most beloved peace officer since Dale Cooper descended upon Twin Peaks, Deputy Dewey.
Sydney and horror nerd survivor Randy Meeks are now in college. A movie from the events of the first movie, called Stab, is released, and now a copycat killer is on the loose. Sydney is getting phone calls again and attractive young people are being slaughtered. Gale and Dewey are back to help solve the mystery.
Once again Williamson injects a lot of movie trivia in the movie. There are visual nods to Carrie and Dario Argento and, really, you could devote a lot of time discovering them all.
The revelation is a little silly, but Scream 2 is another critic-proof movie. You see, this is a parody of horror sequels! Of course it’s far-fetched! Like all good parodies, it succeeds both as a comedy and a genuine horror movie.
It’s kind of sad that Wes Craven got stuck doing Scream movies. The first was, I’m sure, a great experience for him. I’d also bet he had a good time making the others, but Wes wanted to do so much more. He got his wish, thanks to the success of the franchise, when he was able to direct Music of the Heart in 1999. It was back to Scream after that, as well as unsatisfying experiences on Cursed and My Soul to Take. At least Red Eye turned out okay.
Scream 2 is a nice trip back to the late nineties. The music is mostly enjoyable and the franchise hadn’t grown tired yet. Craven certainly understood camera angles and mood and suspense. Honestly, I think this is one of his best works.
I was at my last checkup and my doctor and I were talking for a few moments afterward. She said her daughter is doing great, but she is obsessed with this Ghostface character. Had I heard of the Scream movies? I smiled. Yes, you might say I am aware of them.
Rating: 8
January 13: The Initiation (1984)
It's one of the biggest regrets of my life. I never went to college. I wanted to, but there was no chance for me. Not without the kind of help I needed. I had no idea how to find it.
I did get invited to some college parties by friends of mine. They were disappointing experiences. The kids weren't discussing Fellini and Vonnegut, as I hoped. No, the parties were filled with loud, arrogant, rich brats. Much like the cast of The Initiation.
Daphne Zuniga started off her career on the right foot. Her first credit was in the above-average slasher, The Dorm That Dripped Blood. Then came The Initiation. She also appeared in the Ill-fated The Fly 2. Soon enough Zuniga was cast in the nighttime soapy hit series Melrose Place. Her fate was sealed after that. Come home, Daphne. Horror is always here waiting with open arms.
Ms. Zuniga got her first top billing in The Initiation as Kelly Fairchild. That was a harbinger of things to come. Fairchild is the perfect stereotype last name for an evening soap opera character.
Kelly had a traumatic experience as a child and now suffers amnesia about the event. Her parents, played by Hollywood vets Clu Gulager and Vera Miles, are obviously harboring a secret about it.
Daph is unwisely joining a frat and has to break into her father's monolithic department store as a hazing prank. She and her dimwit friends begin getting bumped off in the typical ways. Gore isn't the point here. I'm actually not sure what the point was.
The Initiation doesn't quite function as a horror movie, but there's too much death for its melodramatic heart. The students are mostly blithering idiots, cluelessly stumbling around as the death count increases. Working class people would have handled it a lot better.
Yes, there's a big, hairy twist at the end, which reminded me a bit of the vastly superior Happy Birthday To Me.
There's a blow-dried grad student who studies dreams, his goofy assistant, the requisite mean girl, and a bunch of dumber-than-usual dudes. There's actually one interesting character and situation. A repressed co-ed confesses to being molested at a young age. It's the only moment of real emotion in the entire running time of The Initiation.
There must be a subgenre of slasher movies that relates to soap operas. The screenwriter of Curtains was a longtime writer on General Hospital. The Initiation was written by Charles Pratt, Jr. He wrote for, let me catch my breath, General Hospital, Melrose Place, All My Children, The Young and the Restless, Beverly Hills 90210, Models Inc, and Ugly Betty. Not exactly a horror-centric resume.
The Initiation was once available on an Anchor Bay double feature DVD, along with Mountaintop Motel Massacre. The latter is an infinitely better movie. I just watched The Initiation on the lousy VHS-quality DVD from Image Entertainment, as part of their Midnight Madness Series.
Rating: 4
January 14: The Final Terror (1983)
Deliverance is obviously the gold standard of wilderness survival movies. My favorite in the low budget realm is Rituals, with Hal Holbrook.
The Final Terror falls short of those classics, but it's a pretty good movie.
There was a lot of talent in The Final Terror, both in front and behind the camera. This was the second feature from Andrew Davis, who had major hits with Under Siege and The Fugitive. Co-screenwriter Ronald Shusett previously had a story credit on Alien. He also wrote Dead and Buried and King Kong Lives, before working on Steven Seagal's first few movies. Shusett later contributed to Minority Report, Total Recall, Freejack, and Alien Vs. Predator. Not all classics, surely, but lucrative jobs in the big Hollywood machine.
The Final Terror was produced by Joe Roth, who went on to the highest hierarchy in show business. In addition to producing a lot of huge hits, Roth was the studio chief of Disney for six years. I'll always think fondly of Roth as the producer of Ladies and Gentlemen, the Fabulous Stains.
Rachel Ward is in The Final Terror. So is Daryl Hannah. Hannah isn't bad, but you'd never guess she would become a superstar a few years later.
If all that isn't enough, the Samuel Z. Arkoff seal of approval is at the beginning of the credits.
The Final Terror was shot in the heart the of the slasher genre, in the hallowed year of 1981. It failed to find a distributor until two years later, which definitely hurt its chances for success.
As for the movie, The Final Terror is a grim and effective story of a group of campers who descend into the deep wilderness. A grisly campfire story is told, but there's more than a grain of truth about it.
I love the way the cast is in dire jeopardy but stops to light joints throughout the movie. One even trips on mushrooms!
Though there is some professional stunt work in The Final Terror, the cast put themselves in a lot of dangerous situations. This gives the movie a greater degree of realism than in most of these type of stories.
The Final Terror didn't get the exposure it should have received, but it was still influential. I'm pretty sure the makers of Wrong Turn drew inspiration from this one.
It's nice to end my slasher marathon with something this good. I recommend The Final Terror to anyone interested in these kind of movies.
Rating: 8
Cut and print! That's a wrap!
I don't want anything to think I had a bad time watching these. Despite my many criticisms, I rather like them all. Except for Killer Workout. Back in the days of the drive-in, we took the good with the bad and the in-between. We had a great time with all of 'em.
I like to think I am maintaining the tradition. My old friends are mostly dead. Literally or figuratively. My best movie buddy died a few years ago and I will always miss him. I keep him in my heart as I watch these movies. Other friends have grown old. Not just in years, but in their minds and hearts. They can't take slasher and other types of horror anymore. I sort of get it. I can't take the superhero and cheesy action movies they watch.
If you've stuck with me this far, thanks. I'm sure you need a break as well as I do. I may not watch another slasher movie until next January.
Ah, who am I fooling. I'll watch some independent dramas, some foreign movies, some comedies, but before long I'll be back to the dead teenagers, the soulless killers, the knives, the garrotes, the hooks and the spikes.
Death is out there, but for now he's still a long way off. Let's have some fun before the killer strikes again.
Media vita in morte sumus (In the midst of life, we are in death)
-A Gregorian Chant
Written by Mark Sieber
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