IT HAPPENED AFTER SCREAM Part 8: slasher sequel, slasher comedy, torture porn slasher

This installment of my series looking at the slasher revival of the late 90s/2000s includes a hodgepodge (I totally said hodgepodge) of slasher subgenres—comedy, sequel, torture porn.

BROKEN LIZARDS CLUB DREAD (2004)

Club Dread has one problem—it’s two hours long! Other than that, it is a total slasher comedy party movie.

Bill Paxton plays Coconut Pete, a washed up singer who owns an island resort. He had a hit record with a song called “Pina Colada Berg,” and his rival is Jimmy Buffett (who is not in the movie).

The entire island is filled with eccentric characters, and the film feels like one of those goofy sexploitation comedies from the 80s. There’s even a live Pac-Man game everyone plays in a hedge maze.

On top of that, it’s a slasher! The opening scene rocks, with a guy and girl looking for a place to fuck in the jungle. The guy makes funny sex jokes, and a third girl joins them for a threesome. That’s when the killer strikes!

Despite the adolescent sex humor of the film, when it’s time for kill scenes, things go full-on slasher, with a genuine horror score, killer POV, jump scares, chase scenes, violent kills, and body reveals. And considering this horror comedy came in the wake of the Scream trilogy, there are plenty of in-jokes about other horror movies. Plus, there are campfire horror stories, when this happens….

Once the main characters at the resort realize they are trapped on the island with a killer, they try to figure out a way to get off it, and also try to piece together who could be the killer. This is where the film kind of slows down, but it picks up again once the killer targets everyone at a dance…and the lights go out!

I’LL ALWAYS KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST SUMMER (2006)

8 years after I Still Know What You Did Last Summer, this virtually unrelated sequel made the franchise a trilogy.

At a carnival on July 4^th, five friends play a prank about the legend of the Fisherman, and as a result, something awful happens to one of them. The remaining four—two guys, two girls—make a pact to never speak again of the fact that it was a prank.

A year later…our main girl gets it. She gets the message. In a text. “I know what you did last summer.” Eek!

This rehash of the original film has a good cast of horror faces:

– Brooke Nevin (the film Infestation and appearances on pretty much every horror show that has existed since Goosebumps)

– David Paetkau (Final Destination 2, Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem, Disturbing Behavior)

– Torrey DeVitto of Pretty Little Liars (The Rite, Killer Movie)

– Ben Easter (Husk)

So the main girl goes to tell her friends—although they’ve all stopped talking to each other. Man, this sounds familiar. And then, you know, the fisherman comes after each of them. The kills are pretty intense and brutal, but they are “stylized” with choppy edits and strobe effects. So basically, the kills are pretty obnoxious.

David Paetkau is a lifeguard, so he shows off his hot bod.

There’s a pretty dumb scene in which the main girl is terrorized by the killer on a ski lift. At one point, she researches the Fisherman story, so there are newspaper article referencing the first two films. Eventually, they all go back to the July 4^th carnival. Torrey DeVitto’s character is in a band, which performs. A LOT. Then there’s what amounts to a group chase scene before the final battle with the Fisherman, who is….brace yourself…a supernatural zombie.

Just pretend this movie is not a sequel to the I Know What You Did Last Summer series (the filmmakers basically did), and it isn’t the worst post-Scream slasher you’ll ever see.

SCAR (2007)

Scar combines a standard teen slasher with torture porn—sort of. It actually keeps the two separated for a majority of the film as it jumps back and forth between two different periods of time.

Instead of playing her usually loony role, Angela Bettis stars as a woman who was victimized as a teen when she and her friend made the mistake of partying with the wrong guy—a psycho funeral home caretaker who ended up pitting them in a torture “game” against each other.

She comes back to her hometown years later, which causes her to have flashbacks of what transpired all those years ago and left her with an absurdly fresh looking scar on her chin. This gruesome segment of the film has some grisly good gore and it is interspersed with the current slasher plot…

The other main girl is her niece. And as usual in these small town slashers, she’s the daughter of the sheriff and therefore has a little rebellious streak. Pretty soon, she and her partying friends are being hacked up by killer. Plus, horror cutie Brandon Jay McLaren (Slasher, Harper’s Island, Dead Before Dawn, Hybrid) gets shirtless.

This part of the film makes for a damn good post-Scream slasher.

When the two plots come together, it becomes a whodunit, and naturally, the niece ends up in the same predicament as Bettis did years before. The final sequence of torture actually loses steam because the killer reveal and motivation make for a totally cliché, mainstream slasher eye-roller—as does the bad dream scare ending. It’s still worth a watch for some cheap thrills, but be warned. There’s an excessive use of filters to change the tint of the film constantly—even multiple times within a single scene—and it’s annoying as fuck.