Dir - Mickey Rose/Michael Ritchie
Overall: MEH
1981 was an ideal year to parody slasher movies as they were being released with both reckless abandon and without any desire to differentiate themselves from one another. Student Bodies emerged a year before the similarly stupid Wacko and while both films go for, (and fail at), Zucker/Abrahams style buffoonery, this one briefly slows down here or there to take the piss out of the sub-genre with direct, on-screen references to "body counts", "clues" and moronic character's doing things that are "not smart". Also similarly to Wacko, it lands one or two juvenile gags while dropping the ball with the majority of them. Produced and possibly ghost directed by Michael Ritchie along with writer Mickey Rose who would stick with comedy throughout most of his career, it features a cast made up almost exclusively of unknowns save for Richard Belzer of all people providing the voice of The Breather; the POV Michael Myers stand-in who murders anyone caught in the act of fornication or just anyone who can provide the movie with another wacky death scene. Most of the lampooning is satisfactory if not laugh-out-loud amusing, but it is certainly more "memorable" for being idiotic than anything else.
(1982)
Dir - Tony Malanowski
Overall: WOOF
Dir - Tony Malanowski
Overall: WOOF
How
do you fuck up a movie with such a catchy title? Leave it to regional
filmmaker Tony Malanowski and his cast and crew of mostly people who
would never do anything in cinema again to answer that question with
reckless, unprofessional abandon in Curse of the Cannibal Confederates, (The Curse of the Screaming Dead).
Disturbed by Troma Entertainment because of course, even Lloyd
Kaufman apparently declared it to be one of the company's five worst
titles, which is nice of him to not consider it one of their one worst
titles. The most awful and obnoxious characters known to man? Check.
Non-existent production values? Check. Shoddy, embarrassing, and
awkard sound design? Check. Zombies that do not show up until almost
fifty minutes in? Check. Unfathomably boring? All the checks. So
yes, everything goes wrong in such an embarrassing, Z-rent production,
yet it goes wrong in a way that fails to let an audience laugh at it as
much as would be preferable. Instead, most sane viewers will check out
after suffering through the first thirty minutes of mind-numbing banter
between a group of whiny, unlikable hippy assholes who are out on a
camping trip despite the fact that they clearly all hate each other.
Then Civil War zombies finally show up, stumble around in lousy makeup and Halloween masks, library-cued music pathetically tries to create
suspense, gross munchy noises happen, the end.
(1988)
Dir - Pen Densham
Overall: MEH
Underwritten, stagnant in its plotting, and accidentally silly, The Kiss is a lackluster and derivative hodgepodge of better horror movies. Screenwriter Stephen Volk was hot off of Ken Russell's perverse and inventive Gothic, but he and Tom Ropelewski's script here fails to enticingly blend its occult/family curse/bewitching elements together. Most of the insufficient details are the same in many a campy B-movie; the dated keyboard score incessantly dictates what the audience is supposed to be feeling, the dialog indulges in groany cliches, the structure is heavily padded with uninteresting character prater, and some of the special effects come off as hilarious instead of terrifying. The latter is the case with a demonic feline that looks ridiculous as it aggressively hisses at its victims while lurching at them like a stuffed-animal that got an electric socket hairdo. As the evil, estranged sister come back to do evil estranged sister things for no reasons that are ever explained, Joanna Pacula is exotic and sexy when it counts, but she makes a fool of herself in the finale with grandiose mannerisms that are hammy instead of intimidating. For his second time behind the lens, Pen Densham does his best with the hokey material and pulls off a few nasty bits of violence, (including an escalator death and a swimming pool on fire for the big finish), but it is not enough to remember anything more than that damn goofy looking cat.
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