Guys just want to get Laid…to Rest

The reason you watch the Laid to Rest films is really for the fantastically grisly kills. While each film has a couple of intense suspense scenes, both movies are total chaos!!! But the extreme gruesome face mutilations in these movies are some (actually many) of the best I’ve ever scene in horror films. In fact, they were so the highlight of the first film that they decided to make face destruction the star of the second film.

The first film takes the classic slasher/stalker chase scene—and makes a whole movie out of it! A chick wakes up in a coffin in a funeral home, doesn’t remember who she is or how she got there (she can’t even remember the phone number for 911)—and spends the remainder of the movie running from a big guy in black with a chrome skull mask and a video camera on his shoulder.

During the course of her fleeing, she picks up one stray guy after another, all of whom immediately sacrifice like EVERYTHING in their lives to help her! I just didn’t get it.  They drive back and forth from each guy’s house to the funeral home to a barn stocked with coffins. For the WHOLE movie. They just keep driving from one location to the next, getting attacked by the killer, and then deciding they need to go back to one of the other places!!! In a very Halloween 5 moment, to break the cycle, they arrive at a police station that has been ravished by the killer. Finally, they end up at a gas station convenience store where the remainder of the film plays out—and our heroine drags another guy into the promise of a sequel. An exciting addition to this film is an appearance by Johnathon Schaech, but unfortunately, he doesn’t last long.

Next comes the sequel. You can watch these films as one continuous film, because much like Halloween/Halloween 2 and Halloween 4/Halloween 5, it picks up right where the other left off. There’s even a small, completely useless appearance by Danielle Harris of part 4&5—although, if they pay her enough, she might actually be in the next sequel of this franchise….

Let’s focus on the Halloween connection. First of all, Laid to Rest 2 gives our killer a name, which is crucial for franchise purposes, so the subtitle of the sequel is Chromeskull. And that, friends of The Shape, Ghost Face, Leatherface, etc., is the name of our killer. And, despite so many hardcore fans finding the Thorn Cult plot of part 6 of the Halloween series to be asinine, that’s pretty much what we get here. The killer mystery is sucked right out of this franchise as we find out that there’s a whole organization working for Chromeskull—including Danielle Harris and Brian Austin Green. Don’t worry, I’m not really spoiling much here—other than the fact that instead of the real Chromeskull, it’s actually Brian Austin Green posing as him and doing all the killing in the first half of the film (I’m having Friday the 13^th Part 5 flashbacks now). While he looks as great shirtless as he did on one season of Desperate Housewives, here, our Beverly Hills alum is just David Silver wandering into the wrong zip code.

But we do finally learn why any man would leave his faceless wife’s body dangling from their bedroom window to save the heroine from the first movie. In this film, she finally flashes some boobage, although it might be a double D booby double. They are HUGE. Well, that is until Chromeskull takes half off….

So right near the end of the film, part 2 finally takes the knives out of Brian Austin Green’s hands and brings Chromeskull back to life after some major surgery (“we can rebuild him…we have the technology”), and then pretty much a whole squadron of detectives are thrown into the mix to demonstrate just how many ways there are to rip off a face. And as Chromeskull is once again not completely defeated, out comes…Johnathon Schaech!!! WTF??? Is he supposed to be a different character? Is there a twist that we won’t learn about until the third film? His appearance just makes the film even more distracting and nonsensical. Oh, and wait until you see the tag after the credits….

Ironically, despite all its slasher conventions and its name, no one gets laid in this franchise!!!  Really, the ultimate reason to watch the Laid to Rest series is because Chromeskull gives good head jobs…