Varied Celluloid

The Plot: Italy, 1973, the mob has been fractured by heavy police involvement in all of their forms of business. All of the old leaders have left for hiding, leaving behind their Lieutenants which has caused an immense amount of destabilization. There’s no order to the crime world anymore and all of the younger captain’s are taking aim at their new bosses in order to form a more stable union. After the massacre of several rival mob bosses in a theater, Don Giuseppe (Claudio Nicastro), a captain under Don Corrasco (Richard Conte) who gave the order, has recently had his daughter kidnapped by the villainous Cocchi (Pier Paolo Capponi) who plans on getting his hands upon Giuseppe in order to torture information out of him while eventually going after Corrasco’s empire. The one thing they didn’t count on though is Nick Lanzetta (Henry Silva), a cold blooded and calculating hit man who will stop at nothing to protect the family. Nick hits the streets and before long he’ll find these men… and make them pay!

The Review: Henry Silva is a dog. A true beast of a man in every way fashionable. What makes him so special one might ask? How about his bizarre masculinity and very different facial structure for starts? Piercing features that give any film geek a very homo-erotic feeling of super charged manimal lust… well, maybe the infatuation that we movie geeks have isn’t quite that strong, but best to believe the guy is really great at what he does. His unconventional look is just a part of what makes him such an iconic character. The roles he so often portrays is another building block in what makes the myth out of the man. Il Boss here (That’s Eye-Talian for THE Boss!) is certainly a cornerstone in both his career as well as in director Fernando Di Leo’s, who directed plenty other Italian genre films but may be best known for this particular feature. Why? Because Il Boss kinda takes everything you’ve heard about the Euro-Crime genre and then amplifies it. It is not a nuanced or complicated movie, even if the plot at times starts to become so. Really, all you need to know about Il Boss is that Henry Silva is a bad scary man and he’s here to mess other people up in a big way.

Sure, the movie has more going for it than just that. And I’ll get to those things in a moment, but what carries the movie is the performance from Henry Silva. What is crazy about that though is that he really doesn’t have to do a whole lot here in terms of actual acting. The character of Nick Lanzetta is such a HARD guy. Silva literally avoids all emotion in his role. His range goes from “sneer” to “annoyance” to outright “anger” in nearly all scenes. Even when this guy makes love he still looks like he’s ready to crack someone’s sternum. Really, when you start getting to know this character your first thoughts would be that surely this guy has no interest in the opposite sex. Doing so would somehow crack that veneer of invulnerability. That this monster could somehow engage in an extremely intimate or sentimental action such as sex doesn’t seem at all logical. That’s sort of what makes him interesting though, as when we see Nick’s apartment during the film it’s hard not to notice the littering of pornography all over his walls. He takes sex and he makes it into something primal and the least bit emotional; which is so fitting for this guy. Silva may not have to do much, but he does get his point across in tremendous fashion.

Aside from the presence of one Henry Silva, what caught my attention most from Il Boss would be the interesting choices made in the script. The issue of having the don’s daughter not only being promiscuous, but being… well, there’s no other way to put it, but being a slut. Say what you want about the women’s liberation movement of the era, but this girl is taking on two guys at a time simply because they are there. Not to mention these are men who have kidnapped her and are wanting to kill her father and will more than likely kill her. It’s an interesting decision and it gives a somewhat unnecessary but interesting background excess that the actress is able to play off of. Her history with her father, her rebellion, all very interesting 3D dynamics that gloss over the fact that she was obviously just there to show off her fantastic body. Aside from this, there’s also the music by Luis Enriquez Bacalov which may make for the most excting music I’ve heard in a Euro-Crime flick to date. A mix of hard rock with snyth jazz, the music really escalates the film to another level. Especially when the hard rock beat starts thumping over the soundtrack, you can’t help but nod your head and expect to see some guys get made dead, real good.

Although the violence in these sort of films are often pretty hyped, far beyond their delivery, I think Il Boss makes good. Certainly not what I would consider gory or bloody by any means, the body count kind of makes up for that. Especially during the intro and the finale. Wow, the introduction, I mean really, how do you even describe it? Without question one of the most insane openings for any Italian crime flick on the market. Death, destruction, mayhem and most of all: Henry Silva with a rocket launcher blowing mafia thugs up. I am so not even joking on that one. Hard to believe this is based upon a novel (that being Mafioso by Peter McCurtin). Rarely did you see the full on body explosion gag in movies before CGI came along and ruined our world, but here we’re given an entire room full of dummies blown to smithereens followed by one other poor unlucky soul getting blasted to kingdom come. How over the top is your movie when you start it off with death by rocket launcher? The last ten minutes are equally as creative in the use of violence, although I’ll not spoil it for anyone. Let’s just say there are bodies dropping everywhere and even a massive explosion. How can you go wrong?

If there was anything wasted here, I would say it had to be Gianni Garko who unfortunately plays the squirmy informant police officer. When I first saw Garko pop up I found myself getting pretty excited at the prospect of a Garko Vs. Silva meet-up at some point but his character just becomes less and less masculine as the movie seems to go on. It’s just unfortunate that Garko didn’t get to play the heavy alongside Silva, but at the same time I have to commend him for his performance as it is most assuredly worm like. Doing a lot of acting with his hands here (much like his chief at the precinct), the character just seems hyperactive at times in comparison to the cold blooded and always collected Henry Silva. Also along for the ride is Richard Conte, best known as Barzini from The Godfather, who shows up here in the role of Don Corrasco. Conte is great and adds a certain level of class to the project, as crazy as that may sound. He is grizzled in his performance and although he doesn’t get to chew much scenery, his presence is definitely felt throughout. Director Fernando Di Leo keeps his film in check with these three stars very much at polar opposite ends of one another. Especially in the case of Garko and Silva who never actually share any screen time together until the very end of the movie. Which brings me to another point, as the film seems to follow two different directions, one focusing on the police procedural direction as they try to piece together just what is going on with the inner workings of the mafia and then the other from the actual vantage point of the mob itself. However, aside from the very beginning when the law gets involved, for the most part these scenes almost seem disconnected from the rest of the movie. As things play out it’s easy to forgive, as it all gets tied together fairly well, but for most of the scenes shot from the side of the law we spend all of our time in the police department which seems so very far from the streets where all of this violence is currently taking place.

Il Boss isn’t your average cops and robbers chase like the majority of Italian crime flicks. It takes a very Mafia story approach but also mixes things up with its changing up of tradition. It is not perfect though. Even with it’s grilling pace, there are still moments that slow the movie down and the amount of dialogue based around names can get slightly confusing when keeping up with all of the characters. Don Giuseppe, Don Corrasco, Cocchi, etc. You really have to listen to the dialogue and get the inflections of just who is who and what is what. This comes no doubt from the fact that it is based upon a novel where you don’t run into these issues, but there probably could have been an easier solution. Regardless, I still loved Il Boss. For fans of Euro Crime, this could be the holy grail if you haven’t seen it already. Brilliant violence, tougher than nails leading men and.. well, a rocket launcher! I give it a four out of five and am very happy with this classic. Check it out!

The Plot: Lady Terminator is a little tricky to synopsize, since it’s almost a tale of three different stories. First we start off one hundred years ago as the South Sea Queen beds her 100th husband who then forbids her from continually killing off the male population with her magic. She vows vengeance in one hundred years against her husband’s great granddaughter. Skip forward to present day (well, 1983) and we run into a young archeologist, Tania Wilson (Barbara Anne Constable ), who is interested in the story about the South Sea Queen. When asking around she’s told there have been many divers who have looked in the south sea but they all came up missing. So she of course charters a boat for herself. When she dives in she is captured by the South Sea Queen and thus allows the South Sea Queen to come back to life using her body. Her first order of business is to track down her husband’s great granddaughter, named Erica (Claudia Angelique Rademaker ), who is now a burgeoning music starlet. However, along to protect her is Max McNeil (Christopher J. Hart), a police officer still coping with the death of his wife. Will they be able to stop this ruthless witch, or will the South Sea Queen take over the world!?

	The Review

Let’s not get things twisted here, I can’t review Lady Terminator with the same set of standards that I would something like “Two Men in Manhattan.” There are certain reasons that would obligate a viewer to search out anything with the title “Lady Terminator”. This isn’t that gem of a title that you’ll find on the shelf in your local Blockbuster. This isn’t something that is going to be highly regarded by most critics. I honestly wouldn’t even define it as a “so bad it’s good” movie. Truthfully, if there’s anything that is going to haul in audiences to see Lady Terminator, it is the same golden fact that drew me to it: This is one weird flick.

We’re talking vaginas biting penises. We’re talking mullets and machine guns. We’re talking about bad eighties fashion and panzer tanks. God bless Indonesia, because when this country was sitting back and watching all of the over-the-top action flicks that were pumped out by Hollywood during the eighties, they only saw the most outrageous moments. It’s like they were blind to anything but the most insane and unbelievable things that were crammed into flicks like Commando, because their take on the action genre is like this insane mix-mash or greatest hits of everything that simply couldn’t be taken serious about the Hollywood action feature. It is for this reason that so many of these films are really developing in their cult audience here in the states, because for those of us who grew up on Hollywood action – these films almost work like spoofs of the entire genre but for some reason they actually take themselves serious.

Lady Terminator has been the real leader of the pack as far as recent resurgences of popularity. “Why is this?” You may find yourself asking. Well, I’ll put it this way. When making my notes, I went back and found that nine out of ten were simply insane moments (I hear the kids refer to them as ‘WTF moments’) throughout the movie. Stuff like Vaginas somehow eating the manhood off some four or five gentlemen (I know I’ve mentioned it a lot at this point, but c’mon!) or a biker actually urinating in his own mouth like that old viral video of that chimp who did much the same thing. Beating that monkey to the punch by DECADES! Groundbreaking? I’ll let you make the call on that one. We’ve got lasers from breasts, lasers out the eyes and enough really awful dialogue to keep you entertained for hours. It’s the perfect party movie because not only is it pretty darn bad, but it’s still somewhat entertaining for the right reasons. Namely, the action. Whether it be Lady Terminator’s hostile take-over of a military base or the highway chase scene with Max McNeil hanging outside his window firing an M:16, this flick actually gets the job done!

Not to play down just how bad Lady Terminator really is because let me tell you right here and now, this most certainly defines the term. Normally when watching a dubbed flick, like this one was, there’s a certain amount of flack that you can spare the actors due to the language barrier and such… not the case with Lady Terminator. Normally when dealing with low budget cinema you become accustomed to a fair amount of over-acting but unfortunately with Lady Terminator you’re served up a smorgasbord of performances with almost no Emote-ing whatsoever. I think some over the top scene chewing would have been just what a flick like this could have really used, but I suppose it just wasn’t in the cards. Oh well, at least we still have the depraved violence to hang onto! Certainly not what I would call ‘gory’, but the gunshots and bloody violence of Lady Terminator isn’t something to scoff at. There’s a really brutal head shot via Uzi, at least two or three scenes of random guy’s being shot in the testicles (with exploding squib!) and a Robocop ED-209 style bit of overkill with someone being blasted until the Lady Terminator’s clip simply runs out. Bloody violence is certainly the special of the day and it doesn’t disappoint.

If there’s ever a glass ceiling of how far a movie should go, in terms of camp or absurdity, then Lady Terminator shatters through it at rocket speed before leaving the earth’s atmosphere. Then as it is propelling towards the moon or some other foreign planet unknown to the general populace, it takes a big fat dump on everyone watching. Yes, it is a glorious spectacle. You’re left almost in tears after the initial viewing. So many questions will be pumping through your mind. Why do mall security guards carry UZI’s in Indonesia? Is mall violence really that rampant? Did no one think continuity was an issue when Lady Terminator was taking four and five shotgun blasts to her abdomen, yet showed no signs of ill effect? Then twenty minutes later into the movie she’s shown with dozens of bullet wounds all over her body? Was it simply a joke that during the boating sequence that one of the sailors was named Popeye? Why wasn’t Max’s good friend Snake the star of this movie? With his EXTREME mullet and awesome catchphrases such as “F**KIN EH!!! ARRIGHTT!!”. Then there’s the musical interlude. Whew, prepare to be taken back to the very worst of the eighties in one very quick segment as the lead actress takes to the stage. Thankfully the Lady Terminator brings us back to reality with her newly found Uzi. This movie does not play games!

The mix of legends with “contemporary” ideas is an interesting mix for the film. Apparently a lot of this Indonesian craziness is actually rooted in the religious beliefs and older tales from the nation. So there are at least some interesting ideas behind the film, aside from all of the blatant stealing from the Arnold Schwarzenegger classic. You’ve got the old meets new motif, but it’s all overshadowed by the insanity crafted from the exploitation. Lady Terminator is a cinematic oddity that certainly appeals to a minor audience, but for those of us who really dig weird but fun stuff – it’s a treasure trove of great things. So many quotable lines here. Within the first few minutes we’re greeted to this universe as the South Sea Queen uses her vaginal powers to destroy some man’s genitals, then when she meets the next man who she humps but can’t kill he jumps up and shouts “You’re my wife now, I want you to stop the killing!”. The logical response to that? “In 100 years I’ll have my revenge on your great grand daughter!” Wait, WHAT!? It blows the mind, but watching with a friend there’s no way you won’t have fun.

	The Conclusion

Lady Terminator is a solid four out of five kinda flick. It could be argued that it could even be higher, but I won’t say this one is perfect. As fun and insane as it is, there’s more that could have been improved upon to make it the absolute best cult movie that it could be. This one isn’t going to be for those types who consider cinema as simply a form for the creation of art. If you can accept that some flicks are just meant to be fun and you’re not above laughing at a bad movie, then by all means search this bad boy out because few can reach these heightened levels of pure wackiness.

The Plot: At the School of Hope, an all girl home for juvenile delinquents, a young girl named Michiko is found dead from a dive off the top of the school. Although the principals, who are in tight with the police department, have the incident written out as an accident – the reality is that the ‘disciplinary committee’ were behind it. This disciplinary committee is made up of a group of students put in charge of handling anyone who steps out of line, given free reign by the psychotic vice principal. However three new arrivals at the school are about to shake things up forever. Noriko (played brilliantly by Miki Sugimoto, well know for her juvenile delinquent flicks) takes on a leadership role amongst the girls. Her background as the leader of one of the most powerful girl gangs in Japan follows her, and she is in search of the truth behind Michiko’s (her former right hand) death. ‘Razor Blade’ Remi Kitano is a young woman most noticeable for her appearance as she wears a cowboy hat, boots and carries a razor blade with her at all times. Koyoko Kubo uses her sexuality to get what she wants, with either men or women! These three girls, along with the help of a nosy reporter looking to find a lead on the young woman killed at the school, are in search of the truth behind this awful school and won’t stop until the School of Hope is split wide open!



The Review: I am a lover of all Japanese cinema, and if you’ve taken the time to search out as obscure a title as this film today I suspect most of you are as well. My experience with Japanese cinema started with Battle Royale and Takashi Miike’s Audition, each released roughly around the beginning of this decade. Although I sometimes feel like I’ve been watching forever, I realize that’s only a short amount of time and my experience with Nippon cinema from earlier than that has been relatively light. I’ve seen a few Yakuza flicks here and there, quite a few samurai tales but I have up until this point avoided much of the Pinky Violence genre. The reason for this would probably be rooted in my experiences with the Yakuza films of the era that I have had experience with, which at the time of my watching I simply didn’t find as much to love in them as I kind of thought I would. So after a few disappointments (and I’d rather not even go into which films, as I think I may actually enjoy them if I went back to them later) I essentially marked off most films from the 60s and 70s as being nice to look at but painful to sit through, due to boredom. However, when I finally bit the bullet and did a swan dive into the Pinky Violence genre with Stray Cat Rock: Delinquent Girl Boss last month – my mind was blown. Not simply a flick made for the sake of art or for the sake of entertainment, it turned out as a fun combination of the two. A high aesthetic that still delivered the goods that an exploitation crowd might be accustomed to. That film, unlike the one we’re focusing on today, was actually almost virginal in it’s attention to sexuality. Something I didn’t expect. The genre after all was created by Toei studios in direct competition with Nikkatsu studios who had found success with their Roman-Porno (softcore sex flicks with some deviance thrown in there) line. The Pinky Violence subgenre can be seen as the action and violence oriented version of much of the same content, but each film keeps surprising me with the level of depth and the way in which it doesn’t simply rely on the exploitation elements to sell the story. The actual story sells itself, the violence and craziness is just a fun little addition.

When discussing Terrifying Girls High School: Lynch Law Classroom at any length, you have to mention the jaw dropping first shots. I mean, you really can’t grab your audience any better than to start your film off with both boobs and blood. With Lynch Law Classroom, you’re given both – quite literally. The very first shot is that of a group of teen girls in their school uniforms, wearing red surgical masks and red leather gloves ripping open the blouse of another school girl to reveal her breasts. These lunatics in red we will later know to be the Disciplinary Committee, but for now they’re anonymous boob revealing schoolgirls in the eyes of the viewer. When the knives come into play on this topless girl, I’ll give you one guess where they cut her. Well, two guesses. The correct answer is her LEFT breast! The Japanese fascination with breasts are even more drastic than even we Americans could dare to muster. I suppose if you couldn’t see a vagina on screen without pixels covering it you’d focus all your attention on breasts as well. So, after a little degradation and torture the disciplinary committee starts to draw blood out of the hapless girl’s body via an intravenous drip. All of this sleaze brilliantly inter-cut between scenes of an English classroom and a Tennis match on school property. The dynamic of all of this sleaze paired with the mundane and peaceful activities just around the corner actually works quite well. This young woman is literally being bled to death and forced to watch her own life force fill up a glass container. Once the blood reaches a certain line, she is told that she will be dead. What a way to start a film! I won’t spoil the death sequence but it doesn’t actually come via the blood loss.The blood draining and breast slicing is just the tip of the iceberg, the following ninety minutes are chock full of several very bizarre sexual torture sequences. Not to mention tons of bits with high school girls having sexual encounters with senior citizens, oh and there’s even an orgy! Keep reading!

Yep, there’s a couple of orgy sequences of sorts alright. The most entertaining of which involve the girls, five of them, bedding the principal and recording his throes of passion so that they can play it for all of the school to hear. His cries such as “Sucking on your pretty boobs under your school uniforms!” and “Your uniforms really turn me on!” are actually pretty darn hilarious in the context of the movie. Even if it is a bit odd to have girls who are supposedly in their teenage years molesting this man of roughly sixty years of age. Strange, funny and maybe even a slight bit disturbing, all depending on how you look at it. Jail bait or not, the line “Sucking on your pretty boobs” is a real keeper no matter what kind of movie you’re talking about. The actual disturbing bits come from the torture sequences which take the sexual deviance to all new limits. Nipple torture isn’t really anything new to Japanese cinema, but Lynch Law Classroom certainly seems to be in love with the concept. With two metal wires running from nipple to pubic hair in order to transfer an electrical shock throughout the body, the torture as you may have guessed can be pretty creative. My personal favorite would be the forcing of a lightbulb inside a young girl’s “special place” and then forcing her to do fifty push-ups. You’d think a lightbulb inside the vagina, lit up and boiling hot, would be enough but I suppose the push-ups are an added bit of humiliation. As you may can guess from my back and forth discussions on sex and violence at this point, the film can be kind of episodic in nature, with the film taking on a lot of subplots and giving them dear amounts of attention before moving along to the next. Whether it be scenes of torture or characters who come from out of left field (such as the opposing gang that challenges Noriko in mid school lesson). It certainly seems like the sort of film with a comic book background, although it is not to my knowledge. The way characters are woven into the story with so little backstory behind their actions, it just seems so far and away from your usual dramatic storytelling. Essentially, there’s nothing very ordinary about this movie.

The three main characters of Noriko, ‘Razor Blade’ Remi and Koyoko Kubo are all three such interesting characters. Despite this being a film where women have their nipples tortured and are subjected to all kinds of degradation; these three women are all shown to be so strong and on top of all situations. They use sex in order to get what they want and to turn the tables on any men who get in their way, but it really walks that line in going between pure sexism to a film about female empowerment and the triumph over a male dominated system. It’s a little quirky, I know. With all of this there’s also a bit of political commentary amidst all of the nipple electrocutions and vibrator lovemaking. The latter half of the film takes on a serious youth wish fulfillment theme with the “adult” characters being squarely pitted against the youthful avengers. With even the school superintendent reading from the book of laws before raping one of the students. There are moments where firehoses are turned on the riot squads and they are the ones being beaten and pelted. There’s also the infamous shot of the Japanese flag being burned amidst all of the rubble. REALLY potent stuff for the time it was released, both in levels of violence, sexuality and political backstory. So what is the overall consensus here? Although two thousand words into this review I haven’t even given a hint about any negatives at this point. However great the film may be, I have to say it doesn’t give off an incredibly emotional response. It is fun for the amount of time you’re involved in it however but you can’t go into it expecting much more than a fun time and some really amazing looking women fighting off hordes with their sexuality and deviance. In the end it ranks up with a four out of five, and it is richly deserved. Definitely recommended!

The Plot: Sally Hardesty (Marilyn Burns) is traveling across Texas with her friends and brother to check on the grave of her grandmother, which has been recently desecrated by graverobbers. When they arrive and find there’s very little they can do, they decide to head back but the only gas station around has no fuel to offer. So the group decides instead to stop in at Sally’s family’s home to see what the old place looks like. It’s a run down shack at this point, as they moved away when Sally was very young, but it has apparently had some visitors in it throughout the years as the animal bone designs that pattern the house would suggest. When the group starts to split up, a few of them find an old house down the trail in the backyard. Their first throughts are to see if there is gas that the group could possibly buy off of them, but this house is nothing they want to get involved with. A crazed family of cannibals lives there, with the psychotic Leatherface leading the charge with his whirring chainsaw blade. This family is mad… and hungry.

	The Review

When I first decided to start Varied Celluloid back in the day, I had this faint idea that I would never really cover the classics. Stuff like the Friday, Nightmare or Chainsaw series seemed to get tons of coverage elsewhere so why go that direction? Well, with this Halloween Horror concept I finally figured it was time to tackle a few of these masterpieces of genre filmmaking. If I don’t do it under this guise, then likely I’ll never get to write about these movies. Although no amount of words will be able to accurately describe something like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, the least I can do is give my own personal experience and interpretation of the film. I personally was kind of late to the film, in comparison to my discovering every other American genre series of any popularity.

This late discovery was based on two different factors, first of all as a very young kid the idea of a Chainsaw Massacre is pretty darn frightening you have to admit. So, growing up the idea of seeing bodies sawed into pieces scared the living daylights out of me. It was one thing to see Jason Voorhees take a machete and slice a teenager’s head off in one fatal swipe but it’s an entirely different thing to see someone slowly saw and carve through flesh and bone. When I finally hit my preteens I discovered mafia movies and from there I found Scarface… BAD idea in terms of conquering my fears. The chainsaw sequence in Scarface, as a 13 year old kid, was probably the most disturbing thing I could have witnessed. For some reason that nerve-fueled five minute sequence just left me shellshocked. It took me probably four or five years to finally discover the Chainsaw series and violence wise I found that I had been sitting on the fence for absolutely nothing.

The violence in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is NOT what has sucked audiences in throughout the decades. That title ropes you into believing that convention says that this flick is going to be all sorts of disgusting and violent, but the actual reality is that this is an entirely psychological form of terror. As a teenager, next to Cannibal Holocaust and Guinea Pig: Flowers of Flesh & Blood (though I may have been twenty seeing that one), The Texas Chainsaw Massacre would mark one of the few times I have been incredibly nervous before a film by what I might happen to actually see. Although these fears turned out to be completely unwarranted it just goes to show both the power that a title can have and the brilliance of the marketing behind the movie. To this day people who have not seen Tobe Hooper’s original movie just assume that it is some kind of terrifyingly brutal film of violence and gore. However, going through it for probably my twelfth time recently there are only a handful of scenes in the entire movie that actually feature blood that you can actually see. That isn’t to say it isn’t violent or deserving of it’s R rating.

To think that Tobe Hooper was actually shooting for a PG rating initially is just insane, even if PG was a more loose rating back then than it is now. It’s just that everything within TCM is implied. We don’t see Leatherface slicing up the bodies, just a shot of the body in the foreground and him revving the chainsaw. We don’t see the meathook go into the back of his innocent victims, just their reaction and Leatherface lifting them up. When Michael Bay announced originally that he had plans to produce a remake of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, but instead this time make it less gory with the emphasis being on the ‘thriller’ aspects… it blew my mind. How could someone remake a movie that they had not even seen? Going on record and stating such a thing, you just could not say such a thing if you had seen the movie. Then skip forward to the release of the movie and it is precisely the polar opposite of Bay’s word and we get an incredibly hyper violent/gory remake that takes it to levels far more extreme than anything the series had ever seen.

What makes TCM the masterpiece that it is? In my opinion, it’s entirely based off of the psychological warfare that the characters play. The hitch-hiker and his insanity in the van, played so effectively by Hooper with minimal sound during the sequence. It’s an awkward situation that slowly goes out of control and even if Edwin Neal does take the character a bit out of range from reality, we can believe it by how awkward and desperate that conversation becomes. He doesn’t come across as some kind of degenerate who takes simple pleasure in pain, he much like the rest of the clan comes across as being mentally ill. Psychotic, insane, whatever you want to call it. These characters aren’t even in control of their own actions at any point anymore. They simply aren’t there. The Cook may be my favorite of the characters. His sequence in the truck with Sally is just brilliant. He bashes the girl repeatedly, obviously getting pleasure from it, then apologizes alongside his actions. It doesn’t make any sense, but neither do any of their actions. We don’t know what made these people the way they are but the unknown is even more frightening than any backstory ever could be.

	The Conclusion

Without a doubt The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is not only one of the best horror films ever made, it’s also one of the best films of the seventies if you ask me. It’s a tense and sordid tale that removes you from your comfort zone and sets you down with these sweaty people on a roadtrip who are caught up in an absolutely horrible situation unlike anything you could ever imagine. It plays ever different angle and leaves the audience bracing themselves for what comes next. Today’s modern audiences may go into it expecting tons of violence thanks to the remakes, but for any younger guys or gals out there who have not seen it – go into this one with the right frame of mind and you’ll find an absolutely brilliant piece of genre filmmaking. The dinner sequence alone is worth the DVD purchase, due to how many times the idea has been used throughout horror films since its release. Wrong Turn 2 is only one of many movies I can think of recently that have their own variation of this sequence. Gather it up, you won’t regret it.

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The Plot: Moving just up the road from camp Crystal Lake, our story focuses on a counselor training camp for young people. Having many who have served as counselor’s before, the team is a tight knit group of young people looking to party down. As is the case with almost every Friday film. However, things get spooky once the teens find out about the myth of Jason Voorhees, who was never found after the incidents of the first film and Ralph the drunk shows up once again to tell everyone that they are indeed DOOMED! On a night meant for partying down and getting loose, the mysterious presence in the woods who has been keeping an eye on the young counselors decides to strike out against them! Who will survive this massacre?

The Review: I guess if you were going to pin down one thing that ultimately helped kill the Friday the 13th series, it wouldn’t just be how elaborate the later series got or how strange they started to become. I think the simplest answer would be that after so many films, new filmmakers just abandoned the whole concept of keeping up with the continuity of the series. The sense that these movies had to remain connected was lost and the idea then became “how do we keep these ideas fresh”; and what came back was the simple answer of changing the backstory or changing the environment. From there on out the series would continue to shell out misfire after misfire. With this second entry into the Friday series, it proved to be one of the few times that the series tried to keep continuity firmly in check. They tried to actually continue the story that was built upon in the first film and kept the logic that building on what had already been done wasn’t such a bad thing. For this reason, among many, it has always been one of my favorites from the series. From the introduction we are taken directly to what happened after the credits closed on that first Friday the 13th. Although the sequence may be long and take up a considerable amount of time in such a short movie, it’s perfect for adding a sense of closure to that first film and continuing the feel of one continued story.

We start with Alice, who was the lead in the original, as we get the direct continuation of her story. This sequence takes place around two months after the events of the first film if the timeline is exact. The rest of the movie is based around five years after the last incident at Camp Crystal Lake. Setting aside the first ten minutes of the running time in order to add closure to the original running narrative really does make for a great start, when they could have just as easily started our movie off with the new camp counselors arriving. There’s a lot of tension as we follow Alice around her apartment. She’s still keeping up with her artwork as it was alluded to in the original film (a VERY subtle reference that most audiences probably wouldn’t get) and a Hitchcock-ian shower sequence that throws the audience off completely. Speaking of other very subtle references to the first film, the first death scene taking place in modern time also features the same fade to white as was seen in the neck slashing in the first movie! Very subtle, but it shows the devotion and belief in the first film. Unfortunately, as the series would go along that same respect and appreciation for the work done on previous entries in the series would be lost.

The great thing about the continuity not being ignored this go around is that it uses the first film as a foundation in order to set up many new additions to the series. It’s an incredibly crucial sequel within, which is no doubt the reason so many of us enjoy it. As many new additions as there are to scare the audience, Friday the 13th Part 2 works so well because in some ways we as an audience know what to expect. I know that sounds about like the opposite of what you would expect to enjoy from a film, but knowing what to expect doesn’t mean we’ll necessarily GET what we expect. The movie opens a whole slew of new doors for us to explore. While keeping a similar tone as the original Friday, it essentially defines what the entire series would soon go on to become. The combination of similarities and new blocks to build on makes for one of the best films in the series. It has has been said about the first film, that it set the tone by starting off with very minimal violence and slowly escalating the bloodletting in order to keep the film shocking all the way until it’s conclusion. For example, the first two deaths in Friday the 13th were all but without blood. A couple of screams and teens falling over. However, here with this second film we have new and different expectations as a viewer. So in this second Friday, needless to say, it starts off with a bang!… or, more appropriately, a stab! In a knifing very similar to the screw driver to the head in Dawn of the Dead, we are welcome to an entirely new appreciation for onscreen violence within the Slasher genre.

Although the film brings back a lot of familiar ideas and motifs, from the original as well as other slasher pictures of the era, it does feature a good number of “Firsts” for this series that would later go on to be replicated in many of the sequels. Friday the 13th Part II is the first film in the series to actually refer to Camp Crystal Lake as “Camp Blood”. A title that would go on to stick around for many years. It is also the first in the series to feature the glorious “skinny dipping” scene that would go on to be repeated so very often, most notably in Friday Part 4 where Crispin Glover stole the show with his “We have no suits!” line. Although not the first film to feature characters that were pretty clear archetypes, this one helped define a lot of similar characters that we would come to love or hate later on in the series. For instance there’s Ted the red headed practical joker, the comic relief character that became customary in most of the Friday films that would follow. There always has to be that one character who doesn’t get to hook up with any girls (the chubby kid with the hockey mask in Part III) or instead serves as comic relief (Glover in Part IV). Unfortunately, much the same as the rest of the series (aside from Glover), Ted really isn’t all that funny.

Changing the scenery to another campground a little up the road from the original Camp Crystal Lake was definitely one of the better ideas of the series. As things would go along and teens would show up to the camp where hundreds had been slaughtered off, it seems only obvious to move Jason a little out of his way and it’s unfortunate so many entries into the series would have rather asked us to suspend disbelief. Even though the camp has changed, we’re still treated to familiar territory as the night turns into a rainy mess while counselors turn up brutalized in various ways. Although, believe it or not there’s actually a little artistry at work in this sequel. Including a few long takes and some very fluid camera movement. Amazing set decorations from the sprawling campgrounds to our killer’s lair, which has become another visual staple of the series. Pitch perfect in design, this “lair” with it’s ground littered with dirt, the walls peeling and falling apart encapsulates the mood of the killer perfectly. There are also some really great uses of silhouette visuals to show the killer’s constant watching over of these kids. So believe it or not there’s still a little tension to the kills here, although at this point we know it’s just a waiting game. When are these characters going to die becomes the only really valid question.

Amongst the classic scenes we’re introduced to in Friday the 13th Part 2 we have the camp fire sequence. The scene, which is nothing more than a rehashing of the Jason Voorhees mythos, has become legendary due to its subsequent usage in other films within the series and the reinterpretation of it in future slashers that would attempt to emulate its momentum. Although it might be a bit contrived, it works extremely well in the context of the movie and actually adds a bit of spookiness in the midst of the story. Now, I don’t think I should go out and say whether or not Jason is the killer here, as we the viewer don’t really know for sure who the killer is until the finale, but the allusion is that the killer is indeed the drowned young man. With the killer not being shown as a physical presence on screen until the sixty five minute mark, leaving us with only twenty minutes left in the film, I figure it’s best if I just avoid spoiling anything for newer fans. For those who haven’t seen this entry though, I will say don’t go expecting hockey masks and machetes. The killer here wears a burlap sack over his head for nearly the entire length that he is onscreen. At this point the killer in the Friday films still remains offscreen until the final moments, just as in the first movie. Taking a very Jaws-esque approach to the situation, we may get the body count started but we won’t know who’s doing the actual killing until the final moments. With just a little over eighty minutes of run-time in the film, the pace is extremely brisk so it’s almost not even a wait.

With just nine deaths (plus at least one dog), it may not have a much larger bodycount than the original but the deaths are certainly more dramatic and violent. With that, the performance and visual representation of our killer amongst many other things, this second Friday may be my favorite of the entire series. It’s certainly not perfect, after all it is a slasher movie, but for what it is it’s one of the best. I have to give it a five out of five. We have a great cast full of interesting characters, many epic scenes that essentially redefined the American slasher, a chase sequence that is as tense as any “final survivor” has ever had in a Friday film and some impressive brutality. Everything you could want from a Friday the 13th movie – this one has. Absolutely a must see for every horror fan.