Horror hottie time: Randy Wayne

April Apocalypse, Hold Your Breath, Ghost Town, The Haunting of Molly Hartley, Terror Toons 2, Grizzly Park. I’ve seen and blogged about a majority of films by Randy Wayne, so it was time to clean shop and see as many as I could access at the moment, which is how this triple feature was born.

THE FUN PARK (2007)

From the decade that brought us some of my favorite “wrong turn” flix, many of which led pretty people to sinister carnivals, wax museums, and amusement parks, The Fun Park is the ultimate example of how not to make one of these movies. WTF with this film?

Framed around a psychiatrist working with the lone survive (Jillian Murray of Cabin Fever 3: Patient Zero and The Graves) the film is about a group of friends that decides to check out the old amusement park where a clown was hacked up years before at closing time, leading to the place being closed down and abandoned.

The atmosphere and music are excellent as the group splits up after some initial roadblocks to getting into the park. Then almost immediately…BAM!

The clown strikes and they are all bound and terrorized in his grisly lair. For the rest of the movie.

Hey, I’m no fan of torture porn, but while there’s some implied here, we don’t even get any gratuitous gore to keep us entertained. Just nonstop whining and whimpering from the victims.

I’m absolutely dumbfounded that a movie with such little substance would not only run an hour and half, but would actually get all the way to distribution without a complete overhaul to make it…to give it more…to…to rewrite and reshoot the whole fricking thing so something actually happens.

To top it all off, Randy Wayne gets completely lost in the shuffle of nothingness going on, even though he’s the lead.

SCAR (2005)

It’s Scar’s lucky day on my blog, because it has the advantage of being the movie I watched right after The Fun Park, which makes it seem much better than the pile of crap it is. It has none of the potential, atmosphere, and horrific advantage of The Fun Park. But what it does have is Randy Wayne in good lighting, Dee Wallace, plenty of bloody kills, and…axe-wielding ghosts.

Randy and his buddy are out hiking when his buddy goes to hook up with a chick he spots cutting wood outside her cabin.

Things turn out really bad for him apparently…

A year later, the buddy’s sister needs closure, so she drags Randy back to the place where it all happened. They spend the rest of the movie running around the forest in circles…as does the plot.

B-movie man Joe Estevez plays the sheriff and Dee Wallace runs the local motel, and they both factor into the story as Randy and the sister begin to unravel the truth of what really happened in the cabin…and the cheesy as hell ghostly forces that still haunt the woods.

Dee steps up to help the pair combat the supernatural evil in the final act, but it’s all so silly it’s almost incomprehensible to see her taking part in any of it.

I mean, how am I supposed to sit back and enjoy an absolutely asinine slasher when Dee Wallace’s credibility is on the line?

PARANORMAL ISLAND (2014)

Even having Randy, scream queen/dancing queen Briana Evigan (Sorority Row, Rites of Passage, The Devil’s Carnival, Mine Games, the Step Up franchise), and Lance Henriksen at the helm of this boat ride to Paranormal Island can’t stop it from crashing into the reeds. Hell, this shit is trying to move with the anchor lowered the whole time.

Lance narrates the awful period piece opener about a murder at a bar on an island in 1927. Like, the bar is the only thing on this island apparently. The bartender hears a sound after closing, we hear a gunshot, fade to…

A couple having sex on a dock in 2014. They hear noises, she gets spooked by something in the water, they run for their boat, we hear a scream, fade to…opening credits.

Our main gang is heading to the island to work at the bar. The bar is the only reason people go to this island. Boats have gone missing for decades, people have turned up dead for decades, people are urged to get off the island as soon as the bar is closed. This bar should have been shut down years ago and this movie should end right now.

But it doesn’t. I really hoped this daddy was going to be their ride to the island, Instead, weirdo Lance is their ride.

While working, Randy also plans to film footage to prove that paranormal activity doesn’t exist for a thesis he’s writing.

So he’s going to film nothing happening and say, “Look! See, no ghosts! I proved it.” Seriously, his little side project is an absolutely pointless addition to this fairly pointless movie.

There’s some really good club music, and with Briana on board, it was like “Step Up to the Paranormal Island.” The party ends quickly, Lance is nowhere to be found to give them their ride back and then…well, we get one of the lamest ghost movies ever. The most you see of the supposed ghost is this image of its face in the monitor. It’s there. Really, it is. Look really, really, really close.

Some of the kids are eventually thrown around on the dock, some bodies turn up dead, and due to bad editing or something, one shows up in the water under the docks accompanied by a musical stinger chord to announce that it’s a big scary moment, yet the two characters in the scene don’t even react.

Eventually Lance returns to pick them up and claims all these ghosts that suddenly appear in the water helped save them. Save them from what I’m not sure, because barely anything fricking happens in this movie.

Now, with all this pretty boy Randy Wayne horror of the past behind me, I think it’s time we get some fresh horror with new improved, rugged Randy…