(1981)
Dir - Noel Marshall
Overall: WOOF
What a strange, terrible movie. What can essentially be chalked up to having a one sentence premise, (family gets awkwardly and sometimes frighteningly cuddled by lions and tigers until their dad gets home, the end), Roar is the infamous wackadoo quasi-documentary by Noel Marshall who put his real life family in all the danger while making it. This is an example of the behind the scenes reality of a movie being far more fascinating than the finished product. Filming took place over eleven years and resulted in no less than seventy cast and crew members suffering major, life-altering injuries due to literally living with and shooting alongside real, wild fucking lions and tigers. The pure insanity you witness on screen is something else alright and some of the actual real-life maimings that took place made the final cut. As an actual movie though, it is just awful. Besides being extraordinarily boring, saying it has tone problems is a severe understatement as it is occasionally an embarrassingly unfunny comedy, occasionally some kind of pompous, wild life awareness propaganda, occasionally a people being trapped horror movie, and consistently bizarre and uncomfortable. The dialog is atrocious and Noel Marshall is easily one of the most annoying main characters in any piece of celluloid you can imagine. Considering the fact that he was not acting but was just a pretentious, clueless douchebag makes the whole ordeal even more unpleasant.
(1988)
Dir - Michael A. Simpson
Overall: MEH
More stupidity follows, (surprise, surprise), in Sleepaway Camp II: Unhappy Viewers I Mean Campers, another chapter that picks up five years after the first one and once again murderizes a bunch of young, horny people with mom hair and mullets. The comedic aspects are more emphasized for this round which is nice that the filmmakers realize that they are making something so bottom barrel as to not be taken seriously at all. In typical slasher movie sequel fashion where we already know who the killer is, the film does not bother with any mystery, getting right to the killing before the opening titles even hit. Bruce Springsteen's sister Pamela plays a now slightly older, officially transgender Angela, (now a dorky camp counselor), who is more liberally unpicky with her/his victims than most serial killers even would be. Though some of the murders are particularly nasty, (drowning a woman in an outhouse toilet full of leaches and feces ranks pretty high up there for maximum unpleasantness), the ending actually seems like a mistake which is all the more disappointing considering that the original Sleepaway Camp's only redeeming quality was its shocking final shot. In this one, there is virtually no story and then everybody dies. Which is probably for the best really.
(1989)
Dir - Mary Lambert
Overall: MEH
Never one of the more renowned Stephen King adaptations and for plenty of just reason, Pet Sematary is primarily a disaster. King not only wrote the script yet also hand-picked the director Mary Lambert, (who also helmed several early Madonna music videos), took a cameo as a minister, and remained heavily involved in the production for much of the way. How it turned out so sloppy is indeed a mystery then. There are pretty sufficient tone problems first of all. It is difficult to tell how many moments were supposed to be ineffective camp on purpose and which ones are so by accident. Three year-old Miko Hughes makes an unintentionally adorable zombie when he is not clearly a dummy being tossed around at least, Fred Gwynne's accent is ridiculous, the two leads in Dale Midkiff and Denise Crosby ham it up inappropriately, there is a ghost that gives off cryptic warnings who becomes more and more of an clown, and too many scenes are directed rather ridiculously. These include all of the clumsy flashbacks and a laughable, lightning fast moment at a funeral that immediately erupts into a fist fight. King's premise is anything but terrible and a few very brief moments are handled acceptably, but there is very little else flattering to say about it.
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