Trial by Terror (1983)

... aka: Acusado sin culpa (Accused Without Fault)
... aka: Das haus (The House)
... aka: Notte di terrore (Night of Terror)
... aka: Traumstein

Directed by:
Hildy Brooks

I used to make it a habit to watch all of the Best Picture Oscar nominees every single year; a habit I eventually broke myself of thanks to movies like Precious (2009). What really killed that movie for me was just how much pain and misery got heaped on the title character. Obesity! Poverty! Abuse! Illiteracy! Incest! Rape! Teen pregnancy! Special needs children! At one point, after already watching Precious suffer through one hardship after another for what felt like an eternity, I sat there thinking "Jesus! What's next? Is she going to get diagnosed with cancer or AIDS or something?" and, low and behold... It was at that moment I started laughing. No, the content itself wasn't funny, and these are all serious issues many people face, but just how obvious it was that the director was intentionally trying to craft something that would hit all of the critical acclaim hot buttons certainly was. Due to how forced and calculated the film was being, I was unable to really immerse myself in it. Or believe any of it. And the fact it worked on many critics and Oscar voters says worse things about them than the movie itself. 

Even though I usually enjoy Lars von Trier films, I get a similar feeling from some of his work as he basically tortures his protagonists for two straight hours to the point where it becomes almost comical. While going absurdly over-the-top works when you're making an exploitation film, it typically doesn't when you're wanting to explore adult topics in a serious manner. This is also one of the biggest issues I had with Trial by Terror.

After saving every penny they've earned for five straight years, Greg Armstrong (Wayne Crawford) and his wife Karen (Kay Lenz) have just put down a down payment on a nice new home in the safe suburbs. Greg is doing well at the gym equipment manufacturing plant where he works and has just been promoted. Out of the workforce, Karen is looking forward to finally having children and starting their family. But their plans for the future are about to all come crashing down. The first bad omen comes during their housewarming party when they hear the sound of glass shattering only to find out their friend Buddy's (Joe Unger) car has been broken into and his stereo stolen. The cop (Rod McCary) who shows up to investigate seems less interested in the crime and more interested in hitting on Buddy's new policewoman girlfriend, Terri (Colleen Camp).

Later that night, Greg and Karen are woken by noises coming from outside. Upon further investigation, they realize someone has taken it upon themselves to dump all of the neighbor's trash cans into their front yard. The police are called again and the officer who shows up writes it off as "a little malicious mischief" and says they can't do anything about it. He does however let Greg know that if he doesn't clean it up they'll be cited and have to pay a fine for littering! Greg's best friend K.C. (Karl Johnson) suggests he get a gun, but Greg is resistant due to Karen's dislike of firearms. That resistance doesn't last long after Greg and Karen return home from a nice promotion celebration dinner only to find the punks have broken in, spray painted their walls, destroyed nearly everything they own and left behind a death threat. Firearm it is!

Of course the cops are called and, yet again, do absolutely nothing but nonchalantly talk about cars (?) while they're there. Karen goes to her next door neighbor to ask if she heard or saw anything. The widowed cat lady who lives there informs her, "Nobody's gonna protect me so I mind my own business!" Greg finally goes to the gun store to purchase a rifle and just in the nick of time as the intruders break into their home yet again later that same evening. This time, Greg shoots one of them dead. When the cops arrive this FOURTH time, the couple are victimized all over again when she's restrained and he's almost shot, thrown to the floor and handcuffed. And this is just the beginning of their troubles.

The couple are forced to go to a hotel for a few days, then try to return home only to be greeted by a chalk outline of the intruder's body and a blood-splattered wall. The fact they're being targeted by multiple punks also makes it impossible to feel safe there as one of them could return at any time for revenge. Back to the hotel they go. When they're finally forced to return, they receive anonymous death threats by phone and are hounded by the press, who question whether or not they used excessive force. Every noise becomes a potential intruder and the husband is haunted by guilt for killing a teenager. The district attorney is thinking about pressing criminal charges and then the dead intruder's mother decides to sue them for wrongful death in civil court, threatening to bankrupt them and make them lose the house, anyway. Geesh!

On the bright side, they find an ally in detective Jay Galen (Martin Landau), a 20-year homicide veteran, who talks D.A. Frederick Estus ("Allan Goorwitz" / Allen Garfield) out of prosecuting Greg for murder, as he's planning to do merely to set an example. Still, someone continues to lurk outside the couple's home, so they're forced to move to a trailer in the country that Greg's boss owns and lets them use. The faceless stalkers eventually track Greg down at work and try to kill him with a welding torch and then find out where the trailer is and go after Karen.

While there's not much "terror" in this obscure film, there's enough empty yapping and flat / unimaginative direction to make this feel like it was made-for-the-tube. A lot of action movies and thrillers made in the 70s and 80s were basically a call to arms for (usually white) "good people" to run out and buy guns to defend themselves against (usually black or Hispanic) killers, thieves and gang members. This movie starts out that way, but instead of becoming a full-fledged vigilante pic it tries to explore the legal / criminal / social repercussions of using a gun for self-defense. However, instead of tying up those story threads, this completely forgets about them and instead spends the last 20 minutes trying to be a thriller again, concluding with a big shootout. There's no real resolution to any of the couple's other struggles.

Though the acting is generally OK, it's easy to see why this one's been completely forgotten over the years. It can't quite decide what it wants to be and what little it tries to add to the conversation about guns and the necessity of taking the law into your own hands if need be was just as simple-minded and irrelevant back then as it is today. There's even ample evidence that the filmmakers themselves are aware that what they're doing here is steeped in stereotypes and even faintly offensive. 

In order to stave off potential criticism for making all of the criminals Mexican (and the non-English-speaking mother of the slain punk basically an extortionist) and a scene where Greg goes to the “bad neighborhood” and they show nothing but black people walking around, they cast a black extra for the party scene and a Mexican actress (Alma Martinez) in a nothing role as the best friend's wife. See! They aren't ALL bad! And just so they aren't accused of hyperbolic depictions of all cops as inept buffoons, they make sure one of them – just one – isn't so bad. The other 20 are depicted as rude, tone deaf and / or clueless.

This was one of many collaborations between star / writer / producer Crawford and writer / producer Andrew Lane, whose partnership stretches all the way back to 1975's God's Bloody Acre and includes a lot of other movies like Tomcats (1977; aka Avenged), Night of the Comet (1984), Jake Speed (1986) and Servants of Twilight (1991). The executive producer was Ed Adlum (Invasion of the Flesh Hunters) and the busy Robert O. Ragland did the score.

I could not locate a single theatrical poster or English-language VHS box scan for this movie so I have no idea if it was ever commercially released in the U.S. or not. However, CBS/Fox released it in a number of other countries, including France, Italy, Argentina and Germany. The quality of the VHS dupe I watched was awful and this doesn't seem like something that's ever going to get the deluxe DVD treatment.

★1/2

April Fool's Day (1986)

... aka: Die Horror-Party (The Horror Party)
... aka: Inocentada sangrienta (Bloody Innocent)
... aka: Week-end de terreur (Weekend of Terror)

Directed by:
Fred Walton

What appears to be your standard 80s slasher movie for the first 80 or so minutes pretty much is just your standard 80s slasher movie for the first 80 or so minutes, only more restrained. Much more restrained. One could even say curiously restrained... almost as if there's a reason they're being so restrained. Hmm. Yet this one has a reputation for being "different" and "clever" and "a cut above the rest" because there's a pull-the-rug-out-from-under-the-audience "surprise" ending that anyone with an IQ above 70 should be able to figure out given the film's title. But even if that wasn't the case, this is far from the first genre film to even use this same ending (you can go all the way back to at least 1935's Mark of the Vampire) so how this got singled out for adulation is beyond me. I suppose the twist had never been applied to a slasher flick before but, really, so what? This particular genre's bread and butter is high body counts, gore, inventive killings and nudity, so to strip an otherwise pedestrian whodunit slasher of all of its exploitative elements and then put a recycled gag ending in its place makes this worthy of praise how exactly?

It's Spring Break and rich Vassar college student Muffy St. John (Deborah Foreman) has invited some of her "privileged" (and mostly repellent) collegiate chums to spend an "unforgettable weekend" on a private island that her family owns. Among the attendees are the perverted / obnoxious weirdo Chaz (Clayton Rohner), oversexed and sarcastic Nikki (Deborah Goodrich), studious and uptight Nan (Leah Pinsent), womanizing jock Archie (Thomas F. Wilson), try-hard country boy Harvey (Jay Baker), who's basically there to try to brown nose his way into a job with the hostesses' multi-millionaire father, Muffy's very distant cousin Skip (Griffin O'Neal, who was indicted on drug-related manslaughter charges a few months after this film was released) and comparably normal couple Kit (FRIDAY THE 13TH 2's Amy Steel) and Rob (Ken Olandt), who have some minor drama going on about whether or not he's going to medical school.

The island requires a ferry to access and, on the trip over, a couple of the guys decide to pull a morbid prank on everyone. April Fool's! However, said prank ends up leading to the "real" injury of deckhand Buck (Mike Nomad), who gets his face smashed when he's crushed between the boat and dock. After he's rushed off to the hospital, the local constable (Tom Heaton) shows up and tells them they're forbidden to leave unless they hear from him otherwise. The only way for him to get back to the city is to borrow the St. John families only boat. Now everyone is trapped on the island and forced to endure a barrage of gags Muffy has booby trapped the house with, including whoopie cushions, collapsing chairs, exploding cigars, rigged lights, leaky pipes, doorknobs coming off, etc. And what better time for a psycho to start bumping them all off one by one?

Skip, who's feeling responsible for the accident that hurt the deckhand, is the first to disappear that first night. While fooling around in the boat house with her boyfriend the following day, Kit sees his corpse floating under the floorboards. The guys then split up and start searching the island, but Arch finds himself hanging upside down by his leg with a snake about to strike and doesn't return to the mansion. Due to Muffy's sudden bizarre behavior, the miserable Nan wanders off and we don't see her again either. That is, until Nikki stumbles upon her corpse, and the heads of the two missing guys, in a well. Others get bumped off (all off screen) until only Kit and Rob remain. They then find clues scattered about that suggest their hostess has an evil identical twin who's recently escaped from a mental hospital.

One thing that needs to be addressed out of the gate are these contemporary critics proclaiming that this beat Scream to the punch by a decade and a half when it comes to self-aware slasher flicks. Back in reality, the two films are in no way, shape or form comparable. Name dropping Agatha Christie one time does not a self-aware film make. This is frequently also referred to as a spoof. How exactly does it spoof anything? This neither references nor playfully toys around with slasher flicks or slasher flick conventions and hits every beat one would expect from a routine slasher right up until the twist. If this was meant as a spoof it's one of the least clever spoofs I've seen. Part of me thinks those claims were just Paramount's way of marketing the film in light of the success of their critically-despised Friday the 13th series. As in, "See! We're making fun of ourselves now!" Except they're not.

While this does boast a generally likable cast (Valley Girl's Foreman; Summer School's Olandt; Just One of the Guy's Rohner and Goodrich), none of them are likable in this particular film due to the script. Nearly everyone is an asshole and not getting to see any of them actually die is incredibly unsatisfying. Besides, what's the point in scripting stock slasher victim characters if you're not even going to bother doing anything interesting or humorous with them? Least said about the rest of the script, the better. The more you actually think about the plot, the dumber the movie gets until you're left sitting there feeling completely insulted.

Any praise that can be doled out goes primarily to the genius who designed the poster and some of the production people. This is, technically-speaking, slickly made and well-produced, especially as far as 80s slasher flicks are concerned. Some studio head obviously put more faith in this than they did the entire Friday series, as no Paramount-produced Friday film surpassed the 5 million budget April Fool's Day was given. And yet every previous, and later, Friday film managed to far outperform April Fool's Day at the box office. Go figure.

Shot mostly in British Columbia, Canada, there were several alternate endings filmed that ultimately weren't used. Jeff Rovin wrote a novelization based on Danilo Bach's script and Charles Bernstein's (very good) score was released by Varese Sarabande. A God awful pseudo "remake" that's so bad it makes this original look like a masterpiece was released in 2008.

★1/2