Sometimes you just need to take a trip back to the 80s, when we watched fucked up movies loaded with violence, sex, and gore, didn’t have God or prayer in school…yet never shot up our classmates. Having said that, it’s time to delve into the rape and dismemberment in these four from the innocent 80s.
DON’T ANSWER THE PHONE! (1980)
Beyond the psycho killer in this film being beary hunk Nicholas Worth, I was never a fan. While its VHS popularity scored on both the “Don’t” title and slasher crazes of the early 80s, it really just epitomizes the sleazy city rape/murder movies that led the transition from the 1970s to the 1980s. And it’s about as cliché as it gets.
We know who the killer is all along. He works out shirtless and shows signs of religious fanaticism. See, in the 80s horror educated us properly—beware God lovers and religious freaks because they’re the true psycho killers and rapists.
The killer is briefly profiled as having mommy issues. He’s a photographer who uses that as a way to lure female victims into modeling for him. He wears a stocking over his face. He strangles his victims.
There are two detectives on the case. Their big cheesy scene has them going to a whore house and laughing at the various prostitutes and johns that run out for fear of a raid…including this big queen…
There’s also a female radio psychologist who ends up becoming involved in the case.
Her big scene is when the killer has a chick he just fucked call her and then kills the chick while she’s live on the air.
Meanwhile, the film attempts to be “scary” by giving us killer POV and heavy breathing during kill scenes. But just like Maniac, another 1980 sleazefest, sudden shifts to this POV fail to create suspense considering we already know who the killer is while having no connection to the women who come on screen just to serve as victims.
Meanwhile, this is the only time a victim ever answers a phone in the movie, and clearly it’s not the killer on the other end. The movie should have just been called, Don’t Be a Woman.
Nicholas Worth really is the best part of the film. Aside from his endless shirtless scenes, he also plays a dominant pervy daddy so perfectly you kind of wish he was starring in a porn, not a horror movie in which he horribly assaults and kills women. He also delivers a monologue loaded with derogatory racial slurs and sentiments, proving good Christians never change.
PANIC (1982)
This is just good old early 80s cheesy sleazy Euro horror. The monster parts are fun, everything in between is boring.
As always, a science experiment goes horribly wrong. A scientist is disgustingly mutated and hits the streets to terrorize a city in the shadows of the night.
He kills random people: a couple having sex in a car; a woman in a shower; a priest and all his, um, choirboys; and a woman in a movie theater who makes the mistake of stepping into Argento lighting.
Cops and detectives are on the case, giving us the really slow parts, and eventually track the monster to the sewer tunnels for the final confrontation.
Nothing original here. Just watch it for the slimy monster and the kills.
SEEDING OF A GHOST (1983)
As odd as this Asian flick is, and considering its title means exactly what it implies, I found it to be slow and long-winded as it moved towards its eventual zany finale.
After a taxi driver gives a ride to an old man being chased by authorities for digging up graves, we get a drawn out love affair between two married people. Why the chick is fucking the guy is beyond me, because her husband—the taxi driver—is super sexy.
The wife is then gang raped and murdered, so the taxi driver husband seeks the old man’s help in exacting revenge with black magic. The long, weird, drawn out ritual using her corpse causes all the guys in the gang to experience horrible visions before being killed, often with a messed up sexual component involved.
In the momentous, weird climax, the leader of the baddies gets the nastiest payback during his pregnant wife’s labor. You feel kind of cheated by everything that came prior to this scene, because none of it lives up to this insanity.
SLEDGEHAMMER (1983)
Since I recently blogged about Zombie Wars, a new millennium flick from Killer Workout director David A. Prior, I thought I’d dig out his very first, direct-to-video film for this 80s blog.
It’s hand-cam and super synths in the opening scene as a mother angrily locks her kid in the closet so she can cheat on her husband with her boy toy. We all know what becomes of little boys who get forced into the closet because of the sin of sex in 80s horror movies—but you can’t imagine how cheesy slo-mo gory good it is unless you lived through the 80s.
This is as indie as it gets, from the corny moments when the sledgehammer makes contact with no oomph whatsoever to the ridiculously long still shots in between scenes of the house in which the action is taking place.
Ten years later, we meet a group of friends doing a party weekend at the house.
Out from a van pops a load of beefy boys, including one shirtless muscle head and a delicious slab of dumb hairy beef I’m absolutely in love with.
After a hilarious montage of the muscle boy and his woman walking through a field to sappy music, the gang goofs around. There are pranks, beer drinking, food fights, and my slab of dumb hairy beef queening out.
Then they decide to have a séance…
The muscle boy recounts the story of the intro kill—so we see it again to fill time—and then everyone goes off to have sex…
…and to get killed off by a masked dude wielding a sledgehammer.
The set is super low budget—just empty rooms with the minimal furniture and totally bare hallways. And once the kids realize they are being killed off, well, they all go to sleep!
Except the slab of dumb hairy beef.
He roams around the house with a knife and soon lets us in on the weird twist…people can be teleported into a locked room, where they get to meet the little boy from the closet.
It is fricking hilarious when the little boy bitch slaps the muscle boy. It’s even more hilarious when the little boy begins to grown and stretch to morph into the killer.
There is eventually a final girl, but it’s the muscle boy who saves the day…while shirtless, of course.
I fricking love the 80s.
