Hell Night

I love slasher movies.  They're rarely done well, but they supply an important dose of gratuitous nudity and gory violence to any moviegoer's diet.  Even the bad ones usually supply some spectacle --- or, at the very least, they're amusingly bad.  I will tell you right now that Hell Night is not one of the good ones.

The premise is surprisingly solid for a horror movie.  A group of college kids are spending the night in a supposedly haunted house as part of their fraternity/sorority hazing.  The established members will spend the evening frightening the pledges, hopefully to the point where they try to escape the estate (which is, of course, surrounded by a locked and unclimbable fence).  With that premise, there should be...oh, I'd say about fifteen grisly deaths and two sex scenes, right?  Prepare to be shocked.

Or bored.  Whatever.

In the middle of a huge frat house Halloween party, the fraternity president, Peter (Kevin Brophy), and his nerdy second-in-command decide to pull the plug on the party.  Why?  Because Peter wants to have his new recruits, Jeff (Peter Barton) and Seth (Vincent Van Patten), spend the night in the infamous Garth Manor.  On the walk from the frat house to the Manor, Peter explains that it is where old Mr. Garth had butchered his wife and four children twelve years ago, before hanging himself.  When the police arrived, they were disgusted by how deformed the children were, but they never found the body of Andrew, the youngest Garth.

Gah!  He's hideous...!

Legend has it that Andrew Garth still lives in the Manor to this very day.  Now, it is up to Jeff and Seth --- and their sorority sisters, Marti (Linda Blair) and Denise --- to spend the night in a creepy house.  So...wait...Peter stopped a party (unlikely), had the entire party walk to the abandoned manor across town (beyond doubtful), explained the history of the creepy place (without interruption by the drunken peanut gallery?  Impossible!), and then leaves only four people in the place?  And everybody else goes back to the party?  My suspension of disbelief has been ruined already.  Of course, not everybody returns to the party.  Peter, his nerdy right hand, and the head sorority chick sneak back onto the Manor property to mess with the pledges.  That prank starts to go sideways when it becomes clear that the legend of Andrew Garth is true.

When you look at the math, Hell Night is a sure-fire miss.  The premise all but robs the film of a chance at a high body count; there are a total of seven coeds at risk in this movie.  There are only three women with speaking roles in this movie, and only one has a sex scene.  There is no gratuitous nudity, though; she remained clothed even in post-coital exhaustion.  The acting isn't great, either; if having Linda Blair headlining the film wasn't a big enough clue for you, Peter Barton's biggest film was Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter.  As for the killer, Andrew Garth looks like a six year-old designed his character.

Aaah!  It's the Phantom of the Opera!

Despite all that, I enjoyed the first half of Hell Night.  The characters were surprisingly likable for slasher flick characters.  I thought Peter Barton and Linda Blair were decent as reluctant pledges, apparently disinterested in the boozy sex of their peers.  The other girl (who apparently stopped acting after this) was that all-too-rare find in horror movies: an obviously promiscuous gal that wasn't bitchy.  Vincent Van Patten did a decent job as the guy who likes boozy sex and is all about spending quality time with Friendly Slut.  Sure, the acting was hammy and the script was laughably bad in parts (Van Patten's use of "radical" and the surfing/sex metaphor), but it's still fun to watch.

"...and don't give me back my clothes until I've been thoroughly sexed"

When the horror starts, though, things get cliched very quickly.  The killer picks off people, one by one --- surprise, surprise.  Even when the characters know that people are dead and others are missing, they still wander around, loudly calling the names of their friends.  The killer has at least two very convincing death scenes before he actually dies, and there is no explanation of how he survived his seemingly fatal injuries.  Indeed, there is no noticeable slack in the killer's attack as the film goes on.  You will notice, though, a strong desire for Linda Blair to give up and die; she becomes a blubbering idiot from the moment Andrew Garth shows up.

To your left, Garth.  Grab and choke.  Please.

Director Tom DeSimone didn't try anything too fancy with Hell Night.  It's a cheap slasher rip-off, and he did a decent job making this into a comprehensible story.  I don't have anything to add about the direction, really, but DeSimone's filmography caught my eye.  When you look at his IMDb page, there are a bunch of 70s gay porn directing credits under a pseudonym.  When you go to his website, there is no mention of them at all, just a dubious claim that he made both "cult" movies and "classics."  Does his career of B-movies and television directing make Tom DeSimone the most successful crossover from adult films to the mainstream?  Probably not, but I found it interesting for a few minutes and wanted to share.

All in all, Hell Night isn't exactly an unappreciated gem in the slasher flick sub-genre, but it's kind of fun, despite being fairly crappy.  Here is a list of some of my favorite observations:

• Linda Blair's character got "the best room in the [sorority] house," free clothes and a car for joining her sorority and giving her class notes to the head sorority girl.  Because that's how sororities work.
• The fraternity brothers drink from steins, which is awesome.  But those probably need to be hand-washed, which means that some freshman spends a lot of time scrubbing steins.
• Friendly Slut pulls out a bottle of Jack Daniels and some Quaaludes and says "Let's party!"  This is completely unrelated, but she can't seem to remember the name of the guy she is having sex with.
• When Friendly Slut, who has done nothing but throw herself at every guy near her in her every scene up to this point, gets Seth alone, she asks him if sex is all he thinks about.  That would be funny when asking any guy, especially a college-age one, but it's hilarious that the most oversexed character in the film asks that of someone else.
• There's a hedge maze in the Garth back yard.  Who has been maintaining that for the past twelve years in this allegedly abandoned property?  Andrew Garth?  Wouldn't somebody notice the immaculately groomed yard work next to the dilapidated Manor?
• One of the kids manages to escape and runs to the police.  The police refuse to investigate, so the coed walks into a room full of unattended weapons, steals a shotgun, and sneaks out of the police station undetected.  He then carjacks someone at gunpoint, tells the driver to call the police and tell them that he's going to Garth Manor.  When the film ends, hours have passed and the police never investigated the Manor, the carjacking, or the many shotgun blasts coming from the Manor.

The Exorcist

I didn't watch scary movies as a kid.  I think the first horror movie I ever watched was Scream; I was seventeen or so at the time, watching it at a friend's house, and I remember being very self-conscious about my reactions to the movie.  I didn't want to give myself away by shrieking like a little girl or wetting myself.  For some reason, I imagined horror movies as being genuinely disturbing, the very stuff of nightmares.  Obviously, I got over that presumption.  After a solid month of watching (and reviewing) nothing but (often awful) horror movies this month, I have finally come to the film that was, at one point, the highest grossing --- and some still say, the scariest --- film of all time, The Exorcist.  Will it live up to my childhood expectations for horror?  Let's find out.

Successful actress Chris MacNeil (Ellen Burstyn) has a tween daughter named Regan (Linda Blair).  Shortly after announcing that she has a new (invisible) friend in Mr. Howdy, Regan falls ill.  Not cough cough ill, but things flying around the room ill.  Despite exhibiting surprising strength, an ability to rock her entire bed while she's on it, and speaking in a croaking male voice during these incidents, doctors suspect some sort of brain cancer.  Because cancer makes girls talk like life-long smokers.  When modern medicine turns up nothing, Regan is taken to a psychiatrist.  No help there, but if Regan has thrice weekly visits for the next year, they suspect that perhaps they can improve "no help" to "next to no help."  However, around this time, Chris' director (Jack MacGowran) is found murdered outside the MacNeil home; when Chris checked on Regan, she was asleep, but her window was open to the bitter cold evening air.  Hmm...I wonder...?  When medicine for the body and brain both fail, Chris turns to the church.  Her Catholic priest, like the girl at your party that keeps doing the Mary Katherine Gallagher impression, is obviously flattered at being a third choice and is eager to help.  Unfortunately, this priest, Father Damien Karras (Jason Miller), is one of them new-fangled ones that has a psychology degree and might even be losing his own faith.  Father Damien doesn't believe that the Catholic church will allow him to perform an exorcism, and he is even less certain that it will do any good (except from a psychological perspective).  But he asks his bosses anyway, and is surprised that they agree to proceed, but a rookie like Damien cannot do it alone.  The church decides to team him up with one of their heavy hitters, Father Merrin (Max von Sydow).  The two approach Regan's exorcism just as (pea green) spit is about to hit the fan.  What does this film have in store for these do-gooders?  Projectile vomit of pea soup?  Of course.   Impossible physical feats?  Fo' sho'.  Creative vulgar insults?  Absolutely.  And smoking, every character smoking!

Director William Friedkin has built his career on the back-to-back successes that were The French Connection and The Exorcist, and deservedly so.  Friedkin's direction is apparent throughout the film.  He does a very good job composing visually attractive frames, particularly with the shot of Max von Sydow preparing to enter the MacNeil home, which would eventually become the movie poster.  The special effects are handled well (even better than in Poltergeist, released nine years later) and Linda Blair's make-up is fantastic.The acting is all very good, with Max von Sydow (who has looked 70 years old for the last 40 years) and Jason Miller managing to portray depth and poise from two characters that could easily have been ciphers.  Ellen Burstyn looks positively haggard as the film goes on, which is appropriate, but I felt that her character was a little too over-dramatic in the beginning of the film; yes, she's playing an actress, but even drama queens aren't as moody as she was portrayed.  Linda Blair does a pretty decent job, for a child actor, but I personally believe her character was too immature to be a twelve-year old.  Seriously, a twelve year-old with imaginary friends would get sent to the psychiatrist even without the supernatural powers.  Most of the other actors --- aside from the always reliable Lee J. Cobb --- were okay, but not particularly impressive.  Still, Bursyn, Blair, and Miller were all nominated for acting Oscars, and Friedkin was nominated for direction; all in all, the film was nominated for ten Oscars and took home Best Sound and Adapted Screenplay.  Not too shabby for a genre film.

Obviously, the film was well-made.  Did I like it?  Well...it was okay.  I appreciated the way it was made more than I actually enjoyed the movie, though.  Does that indicate that the film has lost its edge over the years, or am I just jaded after seeing so many gory horror movies?  While it's true that a lot of time has passed since this film came out, and it is a film that suggests more than it shows, I think it still packs as much of a punch as ever.  There are some seriously disturbing scenes, particularly the violent masturbation scene and the first possession scene.  However, I was unimpressed with the classic pea soup vomit and Blair's head turning like it was on a lazy susan; they looked technically fine, but I thought they were the least frightening aspects of the possession.  So, I would argue that the film has aged pretty well and that the more explicit scenes were my least favorites.

The key to a film like this is that, since it is not aiming for brainless gore, it has to build the suspense.  Maybe I have just absorbed the basic plot elements through popular culture, but I was never curious as to what would happen next.  Despite the quality of the film-making, I was never frightened or uneasy (well, the needles and blood spurting at the hospital made me uncomfortable).  The story spends a lot of time getting to the exorcism because it's not a normal Catholic practice; because I knew basically how the story went, the build up to legitimize the act of exorcism felt unnecessary to me. Would this movie had been more effective if I was completely unaware of the storyline?  Probably.  Would it be more frightening if I were a Catholic, like the characters in the movie?  Again, probably; this movie didn't attack my beliefs as much as it did any chance of me eating pea soup. Is any of this the film's fault?  Well, that's debatable.  I think I will give the movie another try next Fall and see if it grows on me.  As it is, I can't argue quality work, even if I didn't particularly care for it.