Tag: campitup81

Madman (1981)

All Hallows’ Eve. It’s midnight. North Sea cottages is our third and final woodland destination as we unwisely summon Madman Marz—a hirsute, backwoods local yokel, and Bigfoot-kinda-looking bloke, for a chilly, generic slasher to warm the cockles of your heart. We are quite literally at the whim of a madman for 1981’s… Madman.

We open on a familiar campfire setting with a geezer that simultaneously resembles Jimmy Fallon, Count Karnstein from the Hammer trilogy, and the lead singer from The War on Drugs, crooning a folky ode to the Madman, “Song of the Fifth Wind” in the style of Longlegs doing “Stairway to Heaven,” and relating the tale of Marz… Madman Marz—an alcoholic farmer, who was a real nasty piece of work by all accounts. According to the legend, this guy went loco down in Acapulco one night and bludgeoned his wife and children, then went to the pub, slammed his bloody axe on the bar, and drank himself a beer. Later, ten men jumped Marz, and strung him up—hanging him from a tree. They axed him in the skull, and left him dangling from a noose, but the following day the body had vanished, as had the corpses of his whole family, and they were never found, or seen again.

The object of cocky senior camp counselor, T.P. (Tony Fish) aka Jimmy Fallon’s ceaseless affections is none other than the lead actress from George A. Romero’s Dawn of the Dead, Gaylen Ross as Betsy—credited here as Alexis Dubin, presumably to spare any acting résumé blushes. There’s also a dude with a tash that looks like that one off of Hall & Oates because… 1981. He looks like he just stepped off the cover of Private Eyes.

Speaking of a special retreat for gifted children, the youngest kids I teach in Korea are five years old. I currently have two kindergarten classes, and if you asked them to be a monster they would be the Madman—that’s how glaringly broad this portrayal of an abominable, mountain man barbarian is. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a huge fan. I’ve got all his records. He’s a brute; beastlike and savage, he growls unforgettably, he’s got long fingernails with a Count Orlok arch to his clawed, feral hands. Nevertheless, it’s a real performance and a truly underrated slasher villain portrayal. There’s a kinda scratchy cackle that appears on the soundtrack whenever the titular Madman is near, and when we do bear witness—be he up a tree in silhouette, flashing up momentarily in a torch’s glare in the woods, or partially veiled by a car bonnet, the soundtrack blares the same three, easily mimicable notes. How many movie monsters have their own theme tune? The Madman does—simply titled, the “Song of Madman Mars.”

The Madman is surprisingly spritely. He’s a tad theatrical and has boundless energy, which he uses to hasten purposefully across the screen, and if there’s one thing the Madman enjoys as much as doing murders, it’s dragging dead folks back to his dusty ol’ farmhouse. He’ll gladly push you into a piano, and scratch your face right down to the bone. He’ll haul you through an old house by your hair and impale you on a spike, Leatherface—or Mutilator-style. Remember when Ultimate Warrior would lift other wrestlers above his head and do several straight-armed reps with ’em before administering a gorilla press slam? Hulk Hogan would do the gesture, but he could never stretch his 24-inch pythons up all the way. Well, the Madman can do that. In fact, not only can he lift you up right above his head, he can also break all your bones at the same time.

He’s equally at home in a dusty cellar, putting out candles with his hands as he is climbing an enormous tree like a gibbon. He likes to chop you up, or hang you from a tree—that’s his killing style. Psychologically, the gotcha moments are unpredictable because the Madman can plant his axe firmly in your cranium out of nowhere, or unexpectedly noose you from above, hike you up high from a nearby branch, and dangle you by the neck until ye be dead. The Madman, bless him, also can’t speak English—he growls, grunts, and makes odd, animalistic mutterings and indecipherable bestial utterances. He gallops around the gaff giddily—clearly completely out of his mind, but with a purpose. The Madman also admirably accomplishes all of his goals without any shoes on, which I thought was remarkable and deserved some brownie points. Also, quite contrarily, the Madman will watch you do the hunka chunka in a hot tub—he’s not averse to that. The Madman is a heavy breather, and we often see from his point of view. He’s omnipotent. The screenplay even states outright, “He can be anywhere at any time, and if he hears you call his name, he’ll come for you, and if he comes for you, he’ll get you.”

Again, the inept, clumsy transitions between shots are sometimes dissolves, which get my back up no end, but the plethora of pet peeves are continuous throughout all three of my picks, so it’s actually quite befitting for this curated trilogía. Not that it would ever be humanly possible, but never hide in a fridge under any circumstances. The Madman can hear you chucking objects out, and can likely see all the groceries on the kitchen floor. Horrible decision. The filmmakers have really thought this through, and Madman’s keen misdirection is crucial as we’re never really sure when this rustic ogre will strike. When he inevitably does, it’s always a jolt, it’s always amusing, and I adore the lavish sound effects. There is an enigmatic, and palpably eerie—almost serene presence to the lurking dread of Madman, and it’s more playful than Weinstein’s ’81 Cropsy-a-like, The Burning. You know when Hitchcock used to bang on about his pictures being less like a slice of life, and more like a slice of cake? Madman is a slice of cake. Cryptically, the Madman isn’t killed on screen—he’s down in the basement of his house as it burns, with all his victims just hangin’ around. So beware. Don’t utter his name above a whisper, or perhaps do—he just might lumber back for an overdue sequel. Until then, I urge you to enter the cult of the Madman.

Friday the 13th Part 2 (1981)

Slip on your copper-coloured, shiny silk panties, spritz your bits, and bend over in a car to look for a hairbrush now, as we drive a clapped-out heap to Camp Blood for—you guessed it, 1981’s summer camp slasher sequel, Friday the 13th Part 2.

Known perhaps most notably for the pre-hockey-masked, The Town That Dreaded Sundown-homaging, burlap sack hooded Jason, and the calamitous yet hilarious (not to Roger Ebert) wheelchair machete murder, and its inexplicable, incendiary exploding title credit, Part 2 is the gory glue that holds my Camp It Up ’81 trilogy together. It includes an all-encompassing prologue flashback to the tale of Mrs Voorhees and her disabled son, which underpins the entire Friday franchise, and reminds audiences of the original’s key events. Namely, American telly regular on the CBS game show, I’ve Got a Secret, Betsy Palmer, as Mama Voorhees—chewing up the scenery with her giant dentures in a periwinkle blue Cosby sweater, and properly smashing Adrienne King’s face into the sand like it’s an exposed top turnbuckle. They then not only “recap the decap,” but also replay the iconic Jason popping out of the water shocker. It’s smart in the sense that we’re duped; prepped for the continuing journey of the original’s lead character, Alice, but they whack her at the beginning because in a slasher such as this, a through-line protagonist is quite unnecessary. It ain’t Janet Lee in Psycho, but definitely has forerunner to Drew Barrymore in Scream vibes.

Of course Jason isn’t a hulking, supernatural, toxic waste-dipped mutant freak at this stage—he’s a maybe 5’8″ short king, dressed like a farmer in overalls with a bag on his head, falling over awkwardly, and instead of just murdering someone instantly, he seemingly must wrestle with them for ages on the ground. He is certainly fallible. If you wait in a bush for Jason to round the corner, you can quite easily kick him in the bollocks and buy yourself some getaway time.

It’s got some sluggish, laborious chases—particularly the one involving the ranger chap. It’s too long, and not tightly-wound enough. There’s a ginger character in ridiculously short shorts, who looks like he’s going on safari with a tablecloth for a shirt. It’s got girls in bikini tops, a humorous cut from a Shih Tzu to a hot dog on a barbecue—there’s even an abandoned Halloween mask folks periodically pick up and put on.

Thankfully, amidst these carefree teen fools, there’s Ginny Field—a perceptive and tenacious final girl, played adeptly by Amy Steel. Alright, Part 2’s child psychology ending doesn’t entirely play, but it—I hesitate to say, cleverly homages Hitchcock’s Psycho with Ginny cosplaying as Jason‘s mommy by donning one of horror’s most iconic jumpers—next to Freddy’s. Although strangely, Jason is an unlikely main character to be here, as it is he who fans ultimately rooted for as the series continued. They would also regard the revolving door of teenage guest stars as mere fodder—eagerly awaiting the next effects set piece dispatch. Much to the bemusement of America’s dorkiest pundit duo, Sisk and Eebs, Friday nuts craved satisfying slayings as payoffs—even ranking the likes of The New Blood’s sleeping bag tree trunk bashing, and my fave entry, Manhattan’s rooftop boxer decapitation punch, as if they were a Goal of the Season montage on Match of the Day. What sort of warped, infantile mind would do such a thing?

The best kills in Part 2 include a claw end of a hammer to a sheriff’s bonce, a pre-Basic Instinct ice pick temple (and nose if you’ve seen the full, deleted effect) stabbing. Gene and Rog may not have got it, but poor paraplegic hunk, number 81, getting absolutely annihilated with a machete to the brow, lifelessly rolling backwards in his wheelchair, and awkwardly clattering down a substantial flight of rickety death stairs before bafflingly bleaching out to white is perhaps the maddest murder of the bunch.

To this day, there’s an infuriating censorship quagmire when it comes to the entire Friday the 13th series. Conspiracy theorists submit Paramount are actively ashamed of it, and refuse to reinstate the missing footage to give what Ebert called this “unpleasant, absolutely reprehensible, little sleaze pit of a movie,” or any of its slippery, deformed siblings uncut releases. This proper annoying wrinkle applies to almost every film in the franchise, which even on the latest 4K editions, have trimmed and truncated deaths. Some of the missing bits—The Final Chapter, for example, appear pristine and easily restorable, and others—namely Part 2 aren’t, due to their only remaining origin being an effects guy’s serendipitous, yet shabby VHS tape. Frustratingly, forty-eight seconds of celluloid is still undiscovered in a cutting room bin somewhere, or has since become guitar picks.

Friday the 13th Part 2 was released through Scream Factory on Blu-ray, but as with the rest of the slashed-canvas slashers in this set, the expunged butchery and bloodshed couldn’t be reintegrated into the movie due to either complete incompetence, sheer laziness, or an unattainable source print or negative. The Friday kills were always intended to be protracted, and in most cases were paced much better, with a more shocking nature—particularly Scott hanging upside down and getting his throat sliced in Part 2, which goes on forever and ever, and the graphic, ice pick driven through Alice’s schnoz at the outset, when the fourth-wall-breaking King discovers Pamela’s noggin in her freaky Frigidaire.

Sparing these scissor-happy splices, these now iconic films may have had a shot of standing alongside ’80s splatter staples, The Prowler, The Mutilator, Maniac, Intruder, and My Bloody Valentine, if someone could only get their act together, locate, and reassemble the missing sequences in the same manner. No one wants to watch a dulled version of a movie like this, but sadly, to this day—outside of fan edits, we have little choice. The best you can hope for is to pop over to YouTube afterwards, where some kind crank has recut the kills so they continue on seamlessly, albeit in their lower quality work prints—much like ’81’s My Bloody Valentine did in official releases until it was recently restored for the 4K. Fingers crossed we get uncensored cuts of all the Fridays at some juncture, but all signs point to highly unlikely. If they could’ve, they probably would’ve already.

The Burning (1981)

In the ludicrously lucrative wake of John Carpenter’s Halloween—the Cadillac of slashers, as Bruce Campbell puts it, which was released by Compass International to bank-busting business, and hastily chased up by Sean S. Cunningham’s pioneering 1980 indie megasmash, Friday the 13th, which was shrewdly snatched-up by Paramount, the majors found their shelves bare in terms of competitive pictures, and so began a free for all feeding frenzy, and the accompanying bidding wars for just about any trope-ticking finished negatives going with teens in peril, a masked antagonist, and no pricey, attached movie stars required. Cue a shitload of slasher samesies, and due to Cunningham’s summer camp-set, sub-subgenre trope codifier, the onslaught of counselor carnage copycats continued.

Notable things of which there are three: The Three Little Pigs, Three Blind Mice… Three Amigos. My three HalloRe’ewind picks this year are bookended by Cropsey maniac-inspired horror tales, so let’s begin with an impromptu visit to the burn unit—aided by a very unprofessional porter, as we take a gander at a freak in 1981’s The Burning. Perhaps you’ve seen the 2009 true-crime doc, Cropsey, or caught wind of New York’s foremost boogeyman and spiralling urban legend, in which a disfigured or wronged local man—be he an ex-janitor, funny farm fugitive, or bereaved dad—stalks the woods surrounding sleepaway camps, seeking vicious revenge against his perpetrators or any slasher substitutes who may stand in his vengeful path with an axe, or maybe man door hand hook car door. These real-life, opportunistic counselors, of course, shrewdly utilised the Cropsey myth to bond their groups, warn wayward ankle-biters against unwise solo excursions, and to lay down the law in terms of following their camp guidelines.

We’re leaving for a three-day canoe trip to Devil’s Creek, so our first “Cropsy venture” takes us to Camp Blackfoot with the inaugural Miramax film—Corky Burger (nice name… not) presents The Burning—aka Cropsy (without the “e”), aka Carnage, which was created and produced by the debauched, porcine, towel-dropping, massage-obsessed, cooking pot (and Hollywood actress) defiler, and all-round dressing gown grotesque, Harvey Weinstein. I try to absolve myself of any responsibility when it comes to these lascivious pigs, and the way they conduct their sleazy selves behind the scenes of movies we happen to enjoy. Unfortunately, the direct creative Weinstein association means nobody’s really pushing this picture anymore, but think yourselves lucky I didn’t pick 1984’s Sleepaway Camp—a similar slasher with a hot potato reveal so problematic, even De Palma would put on his very white shoes, and book.

As if that creepy context wasn’t enough, The Burning sets out its sordid stall with a particularly nasty, Peeping Tom-esque, prostitute stabbing with a geet big pair of scissors, which seems to trigger former camp caretaker, Cropsy’s preference for pruning juveniles with gardening shears—he loyally persists with this edged weapon of choice throughout, alongside a rinky-dink, crudely-fashioned flamethrower.

Shady and skeevy? You bet. Some of the disreputable dialogue in The Burning actively oozes, as if Harvey “plant pot perv” Weinstein copied it directly from his bumper book of male chauvinist chat-up lines, and pasted ’em into the script—particularly Eddie’s more desperate, nastier sexual advances. Not to mention elderly teenager, Jason Alexander, refers to a girl’s derrière as “prime meat,” whilst still somehow looking forty years old—even with all his own hair. The Burning is also curious in the sense that it has no final girl to speak of, and perhaps that’s why it palpably veers into a meaner lane of misogyny. There isn’t even a loose argument for a feminist slasher statement here. The ladies are all either starkly starkers (see Sally’s drawn-out, soapy shower scene, and Karen’s superfluous skinny-dip) and explicitly slaughtered, or simply have no real relevance to the plot.

There are several naked glutei maximi—unforgivably, one belongs to the definitely not-Indian guy from Short Circuit 2, who directed the Beckham doc, and another is George Costanza’s. The aforementioned Fisher Stevens plays a character called Woodstock, and participates in what is surely the hairiest, most hideously revealing mooning scene I’ve ever had the misfortune to witness. Truly grim.

As an interesting wrinkle for Italian horror fanatics, the necessity to mask Cropsy’s distorting burns means he doubles as somewhat of a giallo killer in appearance—signature fedora, leather gloves, and black jacket. Disappointingly, to a degree, in spite of clocking in quickly at a mere 91 minutes, The Burning still drags here and there, and is certainly clunkily-directed at intervals—perhaps partly due to the fact that From Dusk Till Dawn Sex Machine, Tom Savini “designed” the horror sequences. Typically, the director will work with an effects technician to achieve the magic trick photography of these splattery killin’s, but here Tom was evidently trying his hardest on his lonesome.