Goofballs and Gaff Hooks - THE MUTILATOR

There is something magical about a good slasher movie, but there is something more magical about a bad one.  Yes, they are formulaic, and most often modeled off FRIDAY THE 13^TH, which itself takes its cue from Mario Bava’s TWITCH OF THE DEATH NERVE.  So what?  Almost all movies follow a formula, from drama to action to romance.  What makes a movie interesting is how the filmmakers interpret, or misinterpret, the formula.  Wild left turns, tonal shifts, and inexplicable reasoning will keep you guessing, even if it is only to guess what the hell the director was thinking.  For instance, take a cute and fluffy sex comedy, mix in a brutal murderer fueled by whiskey and hatred, and get ready for the wholesome bloodbath that is 1984’s THE MUTILATOR.

The Capsule:

Ed Jr. (Matt Mitler) doesn’t have a close relationship with his dad.  Big Ed (Jack Chatham) drinks, is emotionally distant, and blames his son for his failed marriage.  The last point is valid, as 10 year-old Ed Jr. accidentally shot his mom while cleaning his dad’s gun as a birthday surprise.  So when deadbeat dad calls out of the blue and demands he clean and lock up his beach house for the season, Ed Jr. isn’t keen on doing him any favors.  But Ed’s college buddies think it sounds like just the place for suds and love during their Fall Break, so after a couple of quick driving and cleaning montages, they are ready for some subdued, inoffensive partying.  That is, until Big Ed, who had been sleeping off his last bender in the garage, wakes up in a homicidal haze and commences to ruin all their fun.  One by one, Big Ed takes out his son’s friends in increasingly brutal ways.  Can junior and his squeaky clean girlfriend, Pam (Ruth Martinez ), get mean enough to take on Ed senior, or will they too end up on his trophy wall?

Let’s get the obvious complaints out of the way first.  Of all the holiday inspired horror movie gimmicks, THE MUTILATOR (AKA: FALL BREAK) has the lamest.   Fall break isn’t even a holiday, it’s just the arbitrary period between college semesters.   At least Spring Break is associated with bikinis and alcohol and hedonism.  What images does Fall Break conjure?  Sweaters?  Colorful leaves?  The movie can’t even take advantage of the nearby Halloween imagery, because it’s staked its claim.   No pumpkins or black cats here, this is about the Fall Break, bitches.

Even worse, the movie mostly wastes its best asset, showing how spooky a deserted beach town is during the off season.  There’s a little strolling on the beach at night, and a couple goes skinny dipping in a plastic covered public pool (where the tension is dissolved by an excessively long game of Marco Polo), but the vast majority of the movie is set in one small beach house.  It’s like condensing Camp Crystal Lake into a condo.  That said, the filmmakers do a good job of working with their limited set.  There is a nice hide and stalk scene were the killer hunts around the dark house for victims, but the kids are just playing blind man’s bluff with each other and have no idea the person they are hiding inches away from wants to butcher them.  

Those gripes aside, the movie is a wild ride.  This tonal roller-coaster starts with the very first scene.  The prologue starts off all daises and sunshine, with the smiling mom lovingly decorating a cake in her tidy kitchen, cute Lil’ Ed eager to make his dad proud.  Once that colorful, hand drawn sign comes out, we know it’s all about to go south.  That kid’s “All your guns cleaned by me!” birthday surprise is the worst idea since “Your car’s brake lines cleaned by me!”  Sure enough, a moment later he unintentionally blows a hole through mom’s stomach and the cake is totally ruined. When Big Ed comes home, instead of screaming or crying or calling an ambulance, he wordlessly props his wife's corpse against the couch and starts drinking, with Ed Jr watching from hall.

In any other slasher, that kind of trauma would be Junior’s catalyst for becoming the killer. Plus, being raised by a guy who actively fantasizes about different ways of murdering you rarely leads to a happy childhood. Somehow though, he ends up being a mild mannered, well adjusted college kid.  A little boring even.  In fact, his whole crew is sort of a toned down, smooth jazz version of the typical slasher archetypes.   There’s the practical joker, the horny couple, the prude, but all in an inoffensively low key way.  They are so corny they break out a game of Monopoly.  Not strip Monopoly, either, just plain Monopoly.  They are kind of endearing, really, especially compared to the aggressively annoying group of victims populating most slashers.  Those dickheads deserve what’s coming to them, but I kind of feel bad about seeing these kids get bumped off.  

Especially in the ways they get bumped off, because for such an unassuming lead up, this fucker gets brutal incredibly fast.  One kid gets chewed up by an outboard motor, one gets pinned to a door through the neck.  A helpful cop gets stabbed in the face with a machete before being decapitated.  The most gruesome kill involves a giant gaff hook inserted into a region no hook was meant to go.  I suppose you wouldn’t want a gaff hook in any region of your body, but definitely not this one.  All the death scenes go just a little bit longer than is comfortable, at least in the unrated cut.  It would be kind of a bummer if the gore effects weren’t so laugh out loud excessive.  Maybe not that hook scene, though.  That was straight up traumatizing.  

One of the problems with low budget slashers is the lack of a distinctive killer (I’m looking at you, whatever-the-fuck-your-name-was from FINAL EXAM).  I’m happy to say that’s not the case here.  Big Ed doesn’t wear a cool mask or have a deformed face.  He’s not even physically imposing, just a middle-aged dude.  What makes Big Ed unique is his motivation.  I’m not talking about his resentment toward his son for killing his wife.  If that was the problem, he could have taken the kid out years ago.  No, the real reason he goes on a kill crazy rampage is because he is an angry, drunk asshole.  I don’t even think he planned any of it.  He just wakes up with a hangover, hears the kids upstairs, and simply decides, “Fuck it, I’m going to kill all those little college pricks.”

At no time does Big Ed look demented or maniacal.  He just looks annoyed.  Stupid punks making fun of my fishing trophies, I’ll show them.  Stupid cop with his nosy flashlight, I’ll show him.  Stupid other cop trying to stop me from murdering my son, I’ll show him! 

On the surface, the movie seems to follow the sex=death trope to the letter.  The super sexed up couples buy it first, while the clean cut virgin makes it to final girl territory.  It’s a better example of how this trope, or the way it is typically framed, is bullshit.  Big Ed is an asshole, not a prude.  He gives no fucks about who fucks.  This guy would have killed these kids if they were slipping away for bible study.  Now, judging from that one scene with the hook, Big Ed clearly has a nasty misogynistic streak, but he doesn’t let it overwhelm his even larger misanthropy.  He has enough murder in his heart for everyone.   

As with most slashers, the sex=death paradigm serves more of a technical function than a moral one.  Sneaking off for a quick one is a handy excuse to put the soon-to-be victims in a quiet, isolated setting.  It’s also a fine setup for the classic situation where the girl thinks she hears or sees something, but the dude is too focused on getting into her pants to pay her any attention.  Speaking of that, has a movie ever reversed the gender of that scenario?  “Hold on, Tina, I think I heard something!”  “Relax, Steve, you’re too wound up.  Let’s just loosen those tighty whities and you’ll feel better.”

Yes, the final girl does turn out to be the virginal Pam, but that just makes sense.  Not being consumed with thoughts of preppy, white bread sex allows her to pick up on all the warning signs.  Plus, she redirected all of her repressed energies into something more productive, like self defense classes.  This makes the level-headed wall flower the only person even remotely capable of dealing with Big Ed’s murderous, asshole rage.  She is certainly better prepared than her utterly useless boyfriend, who actually locks her in the garage closet while he attempts to be the hero.  After he fails miserably, she has to save herself and his lame ass.  

Big spoiler for the movie’s ending, but it is just too bonkers not to address.  After Pam lodges a lead fishing sinker into Big Ed’s noggin and stabs him in the chest, she and her useless, wounded boyfriend make it to the car and share a triumphant moment while we wait for Big Ed to make is inevitable return.  As expected, the drunken mutilator pops up and starts hacking through their car top with a battleaxe.  Lil’ Ed, who only now puts it together, screams “That’s my dad!”  Pam throws Big Ed off the car, and not being the kind of gal who gets fooled twice, throws it into reverse and plows her tormentor into a wall, cutting him in half.  But Big Ed is so much of an asshole that even though he is just a torso, he still manages to chop off a cop’s legs with his dying breath.  The best thing is the smile of satisfaction as he expires.  Some people hope to die peacefully surrounded by loved ones.   Big Ed dreamed of dying in a pool of his own blood, taking one last dumb son of a bitch with him.

True, THE MUTILATOR doesn’t break new ground as far as plot goes.  The characters never venture beyond their one dimension, and the acting won’t set the world on fire.  Yet, for all its predictable broad strokes, it's the nutty detail work that gives it charm.  I’ve never seen such a weird mix of harmlessly corny and gleefully vicious in one slasher before.  And I love that the killer is just a mean drunk.  It’s a pity the movie didn’t take off, because the Big Ed Halloween costume would be super easy.  You just need a bottle of bourbon, a gaff hook, and a simmering well of familial resentment. Come to think of it, maybe it makes a more appropriate Thanksgiving costume.  In any event, have a great Fall Break you goofballs.

C Chaka

Off the Rails - NIGHT TRAIN TO TERROR

Do you ever read Judge Parker?  It’s one of those serialized comic strips in newspapers, sort of a three to six panel soap opera.  Unlike the stogey, stuck in the past strips like Mark Trail or Mary Worth, Judge Parker is a modern, fast paced thriller.  It has storylines about kidnapping, international hitmen, and factories collapsing into sink holes.  Someone is always yelling about being betrayed or set up, usually while pointing a gun.  I’ve been reading it religiously for five years, and it’s great.  Because I never have a clue what the fuck is going on.

See, Judge Parker is a daily strip.  I, however, only read it on Sunday, so I’m only catching 1/7^th of the story.  This strip moves fast and has no time for bullshit like recaps or narration.  It doesn’t even have a cliffhanger style where they save the action for the color, six panel spread on Sunday.  Nope, it just jumps right in to someone screaming about some ridiculously convoluted yet exciting sounding topic and bam, it’s gone!  Additionally, since the world of Judge Parker has a cast of, roughly 12,000 characters, and all of them have different, rarely coinciding storylines, I am not only clueless about what these people are talking about, I have no idea who they are.  After five years, I don’t even know who Judge Parker is.  He may not even be alive anymore.  This technique is brilliant if you love surprises.  It’s like being the dude from MEMENTO for 45 seconds every week.

There is only one movie I know of that comes close to replicating this bewildering experience.  Astonishingly, it’s not even Italian.  No, this kind of magic comes from taking three unrelated low budget horror movies, chopping them down to twenty minutes each, and squeezing them in between footage of God and Satan having a contest (maybe?) while riding on a celestial train that is also just a regular train, that is also a music video for an 80s band you’ve never heard of.  There is no preparing yourself for the exquisite madness of the 1985 horror anthology, NIGHT TRAIN TO TERROR.

The Capsule:

In a train bound for destruction, God (Ferdy Mayne) and Satan (Tony Giorgio) engage in a friendly competition to see who can confuse the other with random nonsensical stories.  The first tale involves a hypnotized playboy forced to supply a horror hospital with fresh lady bodies.  Tale two is the romantic adventures of two kids in love and in a suicide cult.  Finally, there is the eternal struggle between Catholic surgeons and the Antichrist.  Warning: contains excessive break dancing, multiple Richard Molls, and gratuitous confusion.

I’m not one to shy away from a confounding narrative, but NIGHT TRAIN TO TERROR almost broke me.  The shear speed at which this movie hurls gibberish can give you whiplash.  It all starts with the ‘80s-ist of ‘80s rock bands performing a music video in what looks to be a set from a middle school auditorium but is supposed to be a train car.  They are performing a catchy little tune called “Dance With Me,” which apparently goes on for hours, because they are still playing it every time the movie cuts back to them.  At first, I assumed that they were already dead and the train is actually Hell, but no, they are still alive and on a physical train.  The train is scheduled to crash at dawn, so it’s not a regular service, although the crew may have scheduled it to stop the song.

I love the audacity of making the excuse for watching three, sleazy, incomprehensible gorefests be a congenial conversation between God and Satan, or Mr. Satan, as the conductor refers to him.  They seem like they are on the same train, except there is a starfield streaking by out of their compartment window.  This isn’t the kind of movie to use metaphor, so I guess it’s supernatural, or perhaps a screensaver, since the window is where they watch the “cases.”    They never explain the point of it, but afterwards they divvy up which souls go where.  God probably shouldn’t have let Mr. Satan choose all the cases.

The first case is the litmus test for whether you can cope with this level of mindfuckery.  We are introduced to newlywed Harry Billings (John Phillip Law), in the middle of drunkenly driving his car over a bridge.  His wife is killed and never mentioned again, while Harry wakes in a mental hospital.  Dr. Fargo (Sharon Ratcliff) assures him everything is fine, then gives him shock treatment.  You can tell right away that there is something odd about this hospital, mostly from the large number of naked women tied to gurneys, and that Otto the orderly (Richard Moll) spends his entire shift kidnapping, molesting, or butchering patients.  If he changed a bed pan, I did not see it.

Soon, Harry is given an injection to hypnotize him—because that is how hypnosis works—and instructed to…  Well, he’s never specifically instructed to do anything, but he is told that slipping a pill into a drink is only one way of doing whatever he is supposed to be doing.  I think Harry is supposed to be drugging women to bring them back to the hospital, though you never see this happening.  Harry goes to a bar and pretends to drink a bunch of shots (which he pours out on the table), and cut to the next scene.  Harry meets a woman for dinner, and cut.  In the best one, he sings hymns with a woman in church and doses her communion wine, which seems especially flagrant.  Oh, and the church inexplicably had a giant pentagram on the front window, but inside is completely normal.  I have no idea what that was supposed to mean.    

You know that visual trick in movies where they show a jumbled flash of violent, disconnected images to indicate how a crazy person thinks?  This is exactly the same, except for twenty minutes.  Thank God (Ferdy Mayne) for the unknown narrator who suddenly pops up and explains that the nefarious doctors are in the lucrative business of chopping up women and selling their parts.  Not organs, mind you, put body parts.  Legs, torsos, and such.  Apparently, there is such a demand that there is a conveyor belt inside the body storage freezer so Otto the Orderly can send boxes of limbs straight to the waiting trucks.  A disassembly line, if you will.

The doctors’ well-oiled mass murder and appendage selling scheme comes crashing down when Dr. Fargo falls in love with Harry (who can blame her) and accidentally misses a hypnotism injection.  The now cogent Harry frees the remaining women and dukes it out with Otto while Dr. Fargo is operated on by her doctor business partner who she lobotomized early in a hostile takeover.  After the blood settles, Satan says to God, “Wasn’t that lovely?” rather than the more reasonable response of “I’m terribly sorry, I’m not sure what that was supposed to be.”  

The second segment, The Case of Gretta Carson, is far easier to follow.  Wild child Gretta (Merideth Haze) hooks up with wealthy, middle aged sleazebag George Youngmeyer (J. Martin Sellers), who makes her a lounge pianist/porn star.  Clean cut college square Glen (Rick Barnes) falls in love with Gretta after seeing one of her films.  They hit it off, but Youngmeyer, a man whose “insides burn with revenge,” isn’t going to make it easy.  To get close to her, Glen is forced to join the Death Wish Club, a gathering of aristocratic death fetish weirdos.  

Club meetings consist of sitting in a circle, cheating death (or not) in the most absurd ways possible.  Imagine the end of THE DEER HUNTER, except replace Christopher Walken’s revolver with a giant, glowing eyed, stop motion bug.  The trick here is to remain perfectly still to escape the attention of the “Tanzanian Winged Beetle”, which is a surprisingly innocuous name given that its sting makes your face explode.  

Each meeting introduces a new, ridiculously complicated chance of fatality.  My favorite is when they hook themselves up to the state-of-the-art Electrocution Computer, which sends out increasingly powerful shocks according to a random pattern of colored lights.  Sort of like combining the game Simon with an electric chair.  Oh, and I cannot stress this enough—it is a talking Electrocution Computer, needlessly explaining the rules in a slow robot voice.  Someone really put a lot of effort into this one.  Justifiably, because the payoff is spectacular.

There are a few scenes of Glen trying to lure Gretta away from the reckless world of random suicide, but that kind of traditional drama is not driving motivation for this segment.  This is obvious from the final game, where everyone is tucked into sleeping bags beneath a swinging wrecking ball as its rope is slowly cut.  The second the ball squashes someone’s head, bam, case over!  Back to God and the devil, who explain in the most dismissive way possible that Glen and Gretta left the club and lived happily ever after or whatever.  Moving on!

The last segment, The Case of Clair Hanson, ends the fun on a regrettably conventional note.  You know the old cliché, a devout Catholic surgeon (Faith Clift) who is married to an atheist Nobel Prize winning author (Richard Moll) is told by a priest that she must cut out the heart of an ageless demon Nazi who looks like Shawn Cassidy in Cabaret makeup (Robert Bristol) and put it in a box made of wood from the true cross.  Essentially, it’s an incredibly bad THE OMEN knock off.  Nothing makes sense, but you can at least follow the plot, which, for this movie, makes it pedestrian.  I am also disappointed that neither God nor Satan mentioned how the atheist looks just like the psychotic orderly from the first case.  Brothers, I suppose.

Two things save this segment. One is the appearance of late-career period Cameron Mitchell as a hard-nosed cop named The Lieutenant.  Mitchell showing up in a low budget movie post 1980 is a guaranteed good time, because he rarely seems to know—or care—what film he is in.  He just rolls in, belts out some heartfelt, disconnected dialogue that he may or may not have just made up on the spot, and he’s gone.  Instantly classed up your crappy movie. You’re welcome.

The other highlight is the huge disparity between the detailed and creative stop motion monsters and the laughably terrible human Claymation that often share the same screen time.  It looks like H.P. Lovecraft meets Gumby.  

As the last case ends, Satan claims victory because of the overwhelming evidence that humans are a bunch of assholes, but God overrules the decision because he’s God.  Satan is cursed to walk the Earth forever and God gets all the children forever.  Seems a little unfair, since no one mentioned the stakes for the competition.  I get the feeling Satan thought they were just wasting time while waiting for the train to crash.  Satan gets the last laugh, though, because God also takes the souls of the rock band, which means “Dance with Me” will be playing nonstop in heaven for all eternity.  Hell suddenly seems more appealing.

Cynics might say the whole purpose of NIGHT TRAIN TO TERROR was to squeeze a few extra dollars out of a few underperforming or unfinished movies.  And they would be right.  Whatever the intent, though, the result was a monumental achievement, arguably the most baffling film ever made.  Certainly, the most baffling anthology.  Hats off to directors John Carr, Phillip Marshak, Tom McGowan, Jay Schlossberg-Cohen, and Gregg G. Tallas for making something truly special.  And for reminding us that while Satan can only laugh, God can laugh and cry, at the same time.  So, suck it, Mr. Satan.

C Chaka