Killer's Moon (1978)

... aka: Killers Moon

Directed by:
Alan Birkinshaw

A bus with eight young female choir singers and a pair of uptight, matronly chaperons on board breaks down on a country road, prompting the ladies to walk until they can find shelter. They eventually stumble upon a huge, unoccupied hotel and settle down for the night, but a quartet of recently-escaped psychos decked out like Droogs for God knows what reason are on the loose and show up there to terrorize them. Also thrown into the mix are a hotel keeper and her slutty daughter, a gamekeeper and his wife, two male campers and, uh, a three-legged dog. There's one potentially novel angle present in this cheap "thriller:" the killers were all subjected to an experimental drug back at the nut-house prior to escaping. The drug puts them in an alternate state of conscience where they believe everything that's going on is only a dream so they can indulge in their darkest fantasies guilt-free. Why this angle was introduced in the first place is anyone's guess as it's poorly handled and proves to be utterly pointless. The escapees are already deranged so it's not outside the realm of plausibility they'd indulge in these activities regardless, so why even bother with the drug scapegoat? It would have been far more interesting had this detailed the effect of the drug on normal people.

I really wanted to like this one and expected to get at least something out of it considering many of the reviews I'd read were somewhat positive. The initial set-up is serviceable (albeit overused), but the incompetent direction, terrible screenplay and a deadly slow pace quickly turn it into a repetitive bore. It falls into that uneasy gray area of B entertainment where it's too poorly-made to take seriously, too silly to ever be disturbing and far too tame to be a trashy guilty pleasure. There are some mildly bloody moments, like an axe to the head and a knife through the throat, but the killings nearly all take place off screen and we just get to see the body afterward. The goriest moment is actually a throwaway WTF bit where one of the nuts chops off a cat's tail with a cleaver (!) A few of the actresses go topless and there are a couple of rape scenes, but these moments are too brief, too tame and too poorly done to please sleaze hounds. You can see the same exact material handled far more compellingly and convincingly in dozens of other films of this type.

Another problem I had was that there are so many pointless characters wandering around that not even the director can keep track of all of them. People go off to do things and disappear for such long stretches of time you complete forget about them by the time it returns to them. Others are at one location one minute and somewhere completely different the next. None of the choir girls are given even the slightest glimpse of personality or individuality and the director refuses to ever settle on a protagonist to give us a focal point to ground the action. I can't really comment on the acting because even Meryl Streep would have a hard time selling some of these lines. During the film's most jaw- dropping moment, one of the girls nonchalantly tells her recently- violated friend, "You were only raped. As long as you don't tell anyone about it you'll be alright. Pretend it never happened."

The final nail in the coffin is the laughably lazy visual presentation, which is so bad they can't even pull off something as simple as night convincingly! The exteriors set during the night were shot in the day with dark filters, but the sky always looks sunny and bright. The indoor footage is perhaps even worse because they don't even bother with giving it a darker look or even closing the curtains so there's always bright light flooding in through doors and windows during the "night." For numerous scenes supposedly taking place inside a tent, they hang up a huge tarp behind a few of the actors that not only is five times bigger than it should be but not even the same color as the tent show in long shots! These scenes have clearly been filmed somewhere on a stage with ridiculously unconvincing matte backdrops, which had me wondering why they didn't just set up a few spotlights and use the nice Lake District locations already at their disposal.

★1/2

Strays (1991) (TV)

... aka: Killer Cats

Directed by:
John McPherson

I love cats. I love horror. Then I should just eat up a horror film centered primarily around killer cats like a can of tuna, right? Well, I was hoping that'd be the case but sadly it wasn't meant to be. Strays, which debuted on the USA cable network, is neither good nor campy nor entertainingly bad. It's sometimes slightly amusing in a "Well that's ridiculous / stupid..." kind of way but mostly it's just a bland, talky TV movie about a bickering yuppie couple, their lame marital / financial problems and their "precious" and "adorable" 4-year-old daughter, who is neither precious nor adorable and will have you hoping and praying she becomes a toddler scratching post by the end of the film. I have a 4-year-old niece and she's beautiful, awesome and smart, unlike the stupid little troll featured in this movie, who gives all 4-year-old's a bad name. During one of the few "scary" moments, the surprised mother walks into her girl's nursery and sees her crib (why is a 4-year-old still sleeping in a crib?!) filled with about twenty cats. Initially I burst out laughing and said "Yes!" but my joy was quickly stripped away as each cat was removed and there was no sign of a bloodied, shredded child's corpse underneath. Does that make me a bad person?

Things open with an amusing low-level cat's POV shot (done in just two takes) that begins outside, trails through the woods, moves all the way around a house, up a flight of stairs and through a doggy door. It then heads through a kitchen up to an empty food bowl, under a chair and under a table, then leaps up on an ottoman and finally onto a fireplace mantle. It's actually a pretty cool shot but alas it's also the best part of the entire movie. We then meet an old cat lady (Eve Brenner) who lives in a large country home with her dozens of "babies." Something eventually rushes up to her as she's exiting the cellar and kills her. The house is put up for sale and purchased by divorce lawyer Paul Jarrett (Timothy Busfield) and his unsuccessful writer wife Lindsey (Kathleen Quinlan), who want out of the big city so they can raise their whiny little abortion Tessa (Heather and Jessica Lilly) in the safety and tranquility of the country. That little fantasy doesn't last long.

Due to neglect and being forced to resort to their natural instincts in order to survive, the cat lady's once-docile fur-balls have transformed into an army of feral felines who aren't above attacking and killing people who invade their territory. In a silly twist, the cats are all seemingly led by a gray "Alpha Cat" that hunkers over, does that low growl a lot and looks just like the cat who played Church in Pet Sematary. In between the few attack scenes, we have to listen to the dad whine about wrecking his car after a cat bounces off the windshield, whine about his allergies flaring up, whine about his wife wanting to keep a nice mama cat and a kitten she finds in the attic and whine about their supposed financial problems. Said financial problems seem to end a scene after they're discussed when the husband tries to smooth things over with his wife by buying her a piece of expensive jewelry. A vet (William Boyett) shows up long enough to stupidly claim that feral tabbies are more dangerous than wildcats and, to buffer out the slim story line, the film's major drama doesn't even involve the cats at all, but Lindsey's divorcée sister Claire (Claudia Christian), who seems to be making sexual advances on her brother-in-law because, well, she's basically a backstabbing slut.

All of the major characters in this one are thoroughly unlikable, which is due more to the script (by Shaun Cassidy of all people) than the actors themselves. Further exacerbating the problem is having a small child in a major role, which pretty much ensures two predictable and extremely annoying things are about to happen: 1. They'll use the kid to try to be cutesy and that will make most people want to wretch, and 2. The child will do numerous incredibly moronic things to ensure the adults are needlessly put into dangerous situation. And boy does this kid ever do the dumbest kid things imaginable at the finale, including going right back into the same cat-infested house she was almost killed in minutes earlier after being told specifically not to. Ugh. The cats themselves are amusing when they're on screen but the director has no clue how to really make them menacing. They're mostly just cute. Even when they're "attacking" and killing people they're cute. There's more "Aww" than "Ahhhhh!!!" Not really a good sign for a film like this.

★1/2

Visiting Hours (1982)

... aka: Fright, The
... aka: Get Well Soon
... aka: Horror Hospital
... aka: Terror at Central Hospital, The
... aka: Terror at the Hospital

Directed by:
Jean-Claude Lord

After a heated TV press conference, feminist journalist and non-violence advocate Deborah Ballin (Lee Grant) returns home to find her house guest dead and sweaty, woman-hating, stress-ball-squeezing psycho Colt Hawker (Michael Ironside) ready to slash her to ribbons. After being stabbed twice, Deborah manages to get the attention of her neighbors and Colt flees. She's taken to County General Hospital, where she awaits surgery on her injured arm, while Colt decides to finish the job he wasn't able to complete earlier by continually sneaking his way back into the hospital and attacking her. Several other women inadvertently become involved, including sweet nurse Sheila (Linda Purl), a divorced single mother of two, and Lisa (Lenore Zann), a loose-living party girl who Colt takes home and beats severely, but lets live. Colt's homicidal misogyny is explained by a series of brief flashbacks that involve his mother flinging a pot of hot oil into his father's face, which of course has made him a maladjusted and impotent man who detests strong, independent women... just like Deborah.

Visiting Hours has a lot going for it, especially in comparison to other films of this type from the early 80s. For starters, the budget was relatively high for a change, affording this very glossy production values and cinematography. The cast is more than competent, with Oscar-winner Grant as an atypically headstrong and authoritative middle-aged lead in a subgenre usually dominated by teen virgins in the central role. Though Deborah's not particularly likable or sympathetic, Purl's strong working class supporting character is and helps to balance that all out. Genre regular Ironside (who landed this part because of his memorable performance in Cronenberg's Scanners [1981]) also does an effective job playing the intense, creepy psycho, while William Shatner is given nothing to really do as Grant's agent. The script is quite ambitious as well in its attempt to bridge the gap between exploitative, disreputable slasher flicks and more socially-conscious thrillers. And yet all the above combined cannot save this film because it becomes an implausible mess after the first 20 or so minutes. That's a true shame considering the opening scenes offer up a few good scares and some genuine suspense.

What partially killed this film for me is its incompetent portrayal of the hospital staff and the police. The psycho manages to get into the hospital and has full access to Grant no less than four different times. Once? Sure. Twice? Highly unlikely, but possible. After that it's just plain absurd. The first time he poses as a florist and kills a patient and a nurse who are in the room Deborah was originally supposed to be in. Instead of informing her her life is in danger, the staff instead keep it a secret and she has to find out secondhand from another patient about what's going on. The killer then sneaks in a second and a third time, killing people each time he's there, but nothing much is done. My question is: Where the hell are the security guards in this film? That's right, they're all hanging out in the downstairs lobby and none happen to be on the same floor people keep getting attacked on. At one point, Shatner's character assuredly tells Grant not to worry after several murders because "They've got a great security system here," which literally made me laugh out loud. He deserves some kind of award for being able to say that line with a straight face.

Any patient in the same predicament - let alone a celebrity patient like Grant's character - would not only have several armed guards posted right outside her door at all times, but also guards in each hallway of the floor she's on monitoring who comes and goes. Not only that, but the hospital would have guards patrolling the outside perimeter of the hospital and ones in front of each and every door of that place considering the murders that keep occurring there. I also couldn't figure out why there was no attempt to relocate Deborah; if not to a new hospital entirely (she just has an injured arm for Christ's sake!) but to another floor or even another room. Of course if this film used even the most basic of logic, there may not be a film at all. Then again, is that really such a bad thing considering how stupid this thing turned out?

Unfortunately, the idiocy isn't just confined to inept security, but is liberally spread through the rest of the film as well. Shatner's character manages to convince Grant to stay in the hospital just one more night by saying he won't leave her side and then in his very next scene is off at another location doing something else entirely. Toward the end, Purl's character gets a phone call from the psycho, who's at her home. With her children's lives in danger and knowledge of the psycho's whereabouts, she gets flustered and babbles some frantic, incomprehensible gibberish to one officer before rushing home all by herself! She could have simply said "Hey, the killer is at my house RIGHT NOW, how about you gather up a few dozen men and follow me over?" Nope, instead she rushes home in a panic and needlessly gets herself stabbed. This is followed by Colt getting into Grant's room yet again and chasing her around through empty corridors because we've already established the staff and police don't seem to care that people are being murdered right and left in this place. I can handle a few dumb moments in my horror films, but this simply has far too many of them.

I've noticed a few defenders of this film pointing out that one shouldn't get too caught up in details because it's "just a horror movie." And to that I say "Precisely!" This is indeed just a horror movie. It's not a good horror movie or a memorable horror movie or a thought- provoking horror movie. It's just another horror movie lost in a faceless sea of other poorly-conceived and forgettable ones from the slash-happy early 80s. And there's a good reason Visiting Hours isn't highly-regarded among most horror and slasher fans: It's slow-moving and takes itself completely seriously yet is too implausible to even be believable.

★★