Film is cheap, but talent is expensive

The Great American Snuff Film

Hmm, so; the 'Great' 'American' 'Snuff' 'Film', eh? Well, it's definitely...American, I suppose.

As for the rest...A more accurate title might be 'Cheap American Student Film', since it's firmly in the "We gots a camera, a scrapyard, and we know two girls willing to roll around on the floor covered in fake blood? We gots a MOVIE!" school of film-making.

In the place where a plot would normally be, we have two social rejects (thin Adam Savage and his accomplice, mid-90s WCW undercard wrestler who's taken one too many chairshots to the noggin), lots of wrecked cars, and two female friends of the production tied up on a trailer floor in shorts and tanktops.
 They (and we) waste time with clumsy molestation attempts from the lost Dudley Brother, and 'brandings' with obviously-not-lit cigarettes that leave no burn marks, while waiting for Monotone Man to cease his endless voiceover droning and get around to killing them.  It does make few feeble attempts to add in some True Crime-y details (David Parker Ray and Lake and Ng, mostly), and even claims to end (after the 'film' itself finally sputters to a halt) with some 'authentic snuff footage', but if you believe that tall tale, then I have this (guaranteed-not-swamp)land in Florida that I can sell you...

I only hope that none of these clowns has a wife/partner/mother that needed them to repaint the spare room, clear the yard or refinish the basement in the weekend this film took to make; that would be the saddest thing of all...

Why does it burn when I slash?

19th January The Burning

I told you it was a Miramax film! In fact, their very first.  Just a bit different from their era of "Yo, middle classes: here's a book and some frocks, now give me a frigging Oscar", but still, it's all cool; New Line like to pretend they're not the House That Freddy Krueger Built, too.

One from my 'Somehow, I have never managed to actually watch this' list; I know, you'd think I would have, since it's a summer camp slasher film from the early 80s, with Tom Savini on the makeup duties; why am I not already there, at least since it's been available uncut for the last couple of years here in the UK?  Part of my 'thinking' behind this 500 films in 50 weeks project is to have a whole year of 'one day's; as in "I'll have to get around to watching that one day".

Well, for The Burning, that 'one day' is today;  witness the touching and doubtless Oscar-bait story of how grumpy drunk camp caretaker has his face accidentally burned off (don't mix naked flames and grain alcohol, kids!), is unsuccessfully rehabilitated, and (after a brief stopoff on the set of Maniac, apparently, in order to pick up a hooker, and butcher her when his melty-face look fails to turn her on) returns to the campsite to slaughter every mother's son in the place

How does it measure up against the campsite slasher subgenre's Ur-Text, Friday the 13th?, or the swaths of subsequent knockoffs?We have the Summer camp setting of course; an open and active one this time, that appears to cover ages 10 to mid-20s, or early-40s if you factor in the camp counsellors (even with hair, Jason Alexander does not look under 35). There is smoking of dope, and dipping of skinny, and pointing of view...or possibly viewing of point...? Anyway! killer's POV, with heavy breathing, and shears in shot. Effects are stellar, of course: SAVINI; need I add more? With a splendid burn makeup on the vexed caretaker-killer Cropsy (that makes Two-Face from The Dark Knight look like even more of the CG howler it truly is - how come his eyeball doesn't fall out?), and a jawdropping scene (restored for the first time in the UK) that de-builds a raft full of growing bodies 50 different ways in 5 minutes.

Unusually, the film is a lot more 'ethnic' than the homogenised norm for camper-slayers; though there are still fewer non-white faces than the front row at a Trace Adkins concert, at least everyone ISN'T a Gentile; including the Final Boy, who's more Leo Sayer than Jamie Lee, and sports an awesome Kotter 'fro that could deflect chainsaw blades on its own, and in a pinch can be used to hide small woodland creatures.

My Favourite Genre...

I have to admit that my favourite genre, or I should probably say sub-genre, is your rural killer movie. Backwoods slashers, inbred families, good ol' boys vs city types, and the city boys a-comin' off worse. In a word...Hicksploitation. Whether it's because I'm from the suburbs, and therefore don't have to take a side in the eternal country-vs-city fight, or whether it's a result of being brought up in a succession of dull British towns, and finding everything American exotic and exciting (I remember being fascinated that you Americans have a chain of shops called 'Piggly Wiggly'...and you don't think that's at all odd?), but I do love them. Of course, they are basically an American thing; here in the UK we just don't have the room. There was that episode of Torchwood with the Welsh Valleys cannibals, but everyone south of Pontypridd or east of Swansea thought that was a documentary...Internationally, there are a few interesting Australian entries like The Cars that Ate Paris, and Wolf Creek, and from Europe there's Calvaire, and I've heard interesting things about this new French film Frontieres...but for me, to have the backwoods slasher in its true form you need Interstates and 'Gas, Food, Lodging' signs.

And, in that spirit; ten signs that you're watching a hicksploitationer:

1. Stupid city people: The most common formula tends to be one or two teenage/college age couples and a boat-anchor hanger-on (relative, stoner who owns the van, one of the girls' whiny best friend). Increasingly of late, the girls will tend to wear vest tops with no bra; said top to generally be light-coloured and end up splattered with someone's blood, not necessarily that of the wearer. Occasionally a film will have a lone female, very rarely a lone male, and once in a great while (Deliverance, basically) a group of men. Mild recreational drug use, and distribution of one character note per person is usually seen, as a chance to make the victims 'human' (annoying) before the movie stops pissing about and gets to the kills.
   
2. Stupid country people: Overalls optional; number of fingers variable. Generally just as creepy-looking as your antagonist(s)/cannibal(s)/guy(s) with power tools, and just as likely to have a gutted teenager in the shed, but usually just there for the orthodontically challenged contrast with the tanned, vitamin-ed, flouride-in-the-water-ed city types. Likely to also fall under point #3:
   
3. The guy at the Gas Station: He's in on it; of COURSE he fucking is. He may be all smiles and barbecue, but he just wants to dump you in a sack and take you back to the creepy house. What do you think the barbecue is, anyway, when you haven't seen a cow in 200 miles?
4. Useless law enforcement: Whether dumb and horny enough to fall for the voluptuous horror of Karen Black (House of 1000 Corpses), or Head-Satanist-takes-off-hood-and-OMG!-It's-the-sheriff!!11! ('surprise' ending of every small-town Devil-worship TVfilm that was ever made), anyone wearing a badge will not help you here. Especially if you're a pinko Commie longhair faggot collegeboy city type; which, let's face it, is all of them.
5. No phones: since the ubiquity of the mobile phone, harder to make the 'killer cuts the phone line/lines down in the storm/'oh, no, Missy, we don't have no phone out here' sound convincing. Now films have to be set in the 10 square miles of the country with no coverage, or in the 1970s, to prevent the audience wondering why the characters don't whip out their iPhone, call for help, and end the movie in 10 minutes. A 'period' '70s setting also has its advantages in that it allows the costume designer to break out the tank-tops and hotpants, and the writer to haul out what I'm going to charitably describe as 'pre-feminist' attitudes with only a modicum of audience eye-rolling.
   
6. 'They moved away the highway': I confess, I claim no knowledge of the complex decision-making process that covers major road placement in the United States, but it seems to me that there would be a lot less trouble if you just put the road where you wanted it to go in the first place. Do you people not plan ANYTHING? In the US, do roads just...happen? It seems to me that moving roads causes a lot of trouble for the small towns who suddenly get no passing trade, and leave the inhabitants therein with nothing to do all day except go crazy, build waxworks and have sex with their relatives. Leading us neatly to points #7 and #8:
7. Unnatural relations: apparently every country in the world has an area about whom the same sorts of jokes are told; 'where men are men and sheep are nervous', '"Let me introduce you to my mother, my cousin and my sister; her name's Ethel"'. Odd families. Marrying farm animals, dead people; anything suffixed -philia, basically. Family trees with a few less branches than they, perhaps, ought to have. I too have tried to work out the family dynamic of the Leatherface clan in the Texas Chainsaw Massacre series; so, if Grandpa is Grandpa, and Grandma's upstairs, then is the Gas Man Dad? And where's Mom? And the platehead guy in the sequel? And where exactly does Matthew McConaghey fit into all of this? Then I had to go and get coffee and paracetamol, and I never did get back to getting it worked out. Anyway, like I say, also point #8:
   
8. Creative impulses: you know, country-style handicrafts are not all quilting and corn dollies, whatever Martha Stewart says. Your rural slasher will tend to have a sideline in anything from eerie, possibly ambulatory, waxworks (Tourist Trap) to eerie, made-from-dead-people waxworks (House of Wax remake), to...ahem...'found objects', which avant garde stylings might find them a place in some ritzy Manhattan gallery, if they could only get an agent. Also, if the world was ready for an artiste using the medium 'human skin, chicken bones, innards and the occasional face'...That isn't Damien Hirst.
9. Cannibalism: yes; long pig. Considering the ease of modern intensive farming methods, not to mention the comparatively-long maturation period of the average human and the low body weight of most of the tank-top girls in these movies (not to mention the fuss they make; all the screaming and running around and all), you would think it would just be easier to raise, you know, actual pigs. Still, cannibalism does seem, from my highly unscientific what-films-spring-to-mind-right-now statistics, to be one of the most popular reasons for preying on the passing tourist. Perhaps, though, we just don't get to see all the occasions when the anthropophages lucked out to a bus full of an outing of the Texan chapter of the BBWs society, which kept them going for a whole winter.
10. Country people hate you: That's what it boils down to, really; whether you're Northern, 'hippie', 'Liberal', female, 'college boy', draft dodger, 'city type', or just come from more than 15 miles away, they hate you and they want you dead. You come down here with your fancy talk and your 10-dollar words and your shiny car and your tank tops and your teeth...#spit#...and you think you can do what ev' you want? This ain't the way we do things down here...boy...

Ahem. Well, you get the point. So, I'm going to be commencing a fairly-irregular series of reviews of my favourite 'Don't get off the highway' films. As irregular as everything is around here. At least it should give me a break from all those awful remakes I've got lined up for Mondays. Just to whet your appetite, follow the link for the theme song from what is probably one of the Ur-texts of the genre; the Northern-hating, banjo-playing, spiked-barrel-rolling 2000 Maniacs:

All together now: 'The South's gonna rise again...'