Worth Mentioning - What Are You, Some Type of a Dick?

We watch several movies a week. Every Friday, we'll talk a little about some of the movies we watched that we felt were Worth Mentioning.

Cody watches a few "dead teenager movies".

SPLATTER UNIVERSITY (1984)

Richard W. Haines' Splatter University gets off on the wrong foot for me, starting with a really cheap looking sequence that's set in a mental institution and makes a mockery of the patients there. I've seen this sort of thing in several movies over the years, and it's always cringe-inducing. Thankfully, this sequence only goes on for 3 minutes before one of the patients has killed a staff member, switched clothes with them, and escaped from the institution. I won't say Splatter University is great, but at least it gets better than that opening.

The film is primarily set at St. Trinian's College, where the mental patient shows up three years later and kills the sociology teacher. When the next semester comes along, the murdered teacher is replaced by our heroine Julie Parker (Francine Forbes / Forbes Riley). Soon after Julie starts working there, and starts butting heads with the Catholic priests who run the place, it becomes clear that the killer is still lurking around the college.

As the slasher whittles down the student population, Splatter University proves to have a somewhat inconsistent tone. It will occasionally display the sort of goofy humor that was evident in that mental institution opening, but it also takes the deaths and Julie's attempts to figure out what's going on seriously - the movie will feel like a straightforward slasher that's meant to be creepy, then a ridiculous moment will be dropped in. This builds up to one of the slasher sub-genre's all-time darkest endings; if someone watched only the beginning and climax of Splatter University, they'd think they came from two different movies. It almost feels like the movie is made up of footage from two directors with different approaches, but while Haines wrote the script with three other people, he directed the film himself. It did take him a couple years to complete it, and in an interview online he confirmed my suspicions that scenes with different tones came from two different blocks of filming - the goofier moments, including the opening, were added after the serious murder mystery version of the film came in short (65 minutes). Haines even said he hates the comedic moments he added in, but I don't think they deserve to be hated. It's just a shame that the worst of them is the first thing we see in the movie.

Splatter University is scattered, but in the end I'm left with an overall positive opinion on it. It's a decent slasher movie, and with a 78 minute running time it goes by very quickly. Fair warning: if you decide to check this movie out, you might get the song "Fugitive Kind" by The Pedestrians stuck in your head.

STAR LIGHT (2020)

Twelve years ago, Mitchell Altieri co-directed (with Phil Flores, under the name The Butcher Brothers) a remake of the 1986 classic April Fool's Day. The remake starred Scout Taylor-Compton, and it was such a painful viewing experience, so far off from the fun of its predecessor, that I try to pretend it doesn't exist. Now Altieri and Taylor-Compton have collaborated again on the horror film Star Light, and things turned out much better for them this time around.

Altieri co-directed this film with Lee Cummings and also wrote the screenplay with Jamal M. Jennings and Adam Weis. Parts of the movie are very reminiscent of Tales from the Crypt: Demon Knight, but Star Light is saved by the fact that it isn't actually a remake of Demon Knight, so there's no need to directly compare the two. Star Light definitely is the sort of movie that Roger Ebert would call a "dead teenager movie"; at its core, it's simply about a group of teenagers who have gathered together in one location so they can get knocked off one-by-one. We've seen this done many times before, both in slashers and in movies that have a supernatural edge like this one does, but Star Light does mix in some unique elements. These unique elements start with Taylor-Compton's character, famous pop star Bebe A. Love.

The story follows teenager Dylan (Cameron Johnson), who is a big fan of Bebe's - and happens to be the person who finds her on the road after she gets in a single vehicle accident. Bebe is banged up and scared, and we soon find out that she's on the run from her handler Anton (Bret Roberts). Dylan takes Bebe to a friend's house where a party has just been held, but now there are only a handful of teens hanging out there. While Dylan tries to figure out a way to help Bebe without going against her wishes and contacting the authorities, Anton shows up at the house and starts lurking outside like Billy Zane's character The Collector in Demon Knight. Circling the house like a shark, as one character describes it. By this point we have already seen Anton cause the deaths of multiple people while he's been following Bebe's trail, so we know he's trouble and that he has supernatural abilities. He proceeds to use those abilities to cause people to die in the house without actually stepping foot inside the place himself.

Altieri, Cummings, and Altieri's co-writers did their best to build up Dylan as a character we can like and care about before the horror action kicks in, giving a glimpse into his life and showing character interactions that include some scenes involving Dylan's single mother Dorothy (Tiffany Shepis). He's not a great character, but he works well enough for the lead, so the film can hold our attention while putting him through some very strange events. Bebe is a bit too odd to connect with (Dylan would disagree with that), and even though the other teenage characters have their moments, I couldn't really bring myself to care whether they were going to bite the dust or not.

Most of the acting in the film is good; genre regulars Shepis and Taylor-Compton are always reliable, and Roberts hams it up as the villain. But there are also a couple instances of questionable acting courtesy of performers who have minor roles. One moment that really stood out involved a line where one character asks another, "What are you, some type of a dick?" This was probably always meant to be a humorous line, but the awkward way it was delivered actually turned it into comedy gold.

Even though Star Light spends more than half of its running time scaring and eliminating its trapped characters, the film never reached the level of action and excitement I was hoping it would. There were times when it felt like it was dragging the situation out for too long, that things were moving along too slowly. It felt longer than it actually is, which is just 89 minutes.

The movie has its issues and doesn't reach the full potential of the concept, but overall it's an enjoyable watch. I was always interested in seeing what was going to happen next, even while feeling like things weren't happening frequently enough, or weren't intense enough when they did happen. It's not good enough to make up for that April Fool's Day remake blunder, but it's decent enough on its own and I felt it was worth the 89 minutes it took to sit through it.

The review of Star Light originally appeared on ArrowintheHead.com

DEADLY MANOR (1990)

Filmmaker Jose Ramon Larraz said that the 1988 slasher Edge of the Axe was his least favorite of the twenty-plus projects he directed, but I don't understand how that could possibly be the case when one of his other directorial credits came on the 1990 film Deadly Manor - which is also a slasher, but a significant step down from the quality of Edge of the Axe.

The story centers on a group of young pals who are introduced while on a road trip to a lake vacation... but they'll never reach that lake, and the hitchhiking criminal they pick up along the way isn't to blame. The very poorly written script has this bunch deciding to take a break from the road and find some place to stay on a back road. The place they find is a seemingly abandoned house, where the remains of a wrecked car sit on a monument in the yard. 

Even though one of the group spots someone moving inside the house (and is so scared that she decides to ditch her friends, walking off through the woods alone), and even though the horn of that wrecked car starts honking once the group has broken into the house - which has a straw-filled stable attached to it, separated from the living quarters only by a hallway - they're still not convinced that they're not alone here. No matter what unnerving things they discover in this place (like a newspaper with a date that confirms someone was there recently, the pictures of a woman that are all over the walls, or the coffins in the cellar) they never should have set foot in, it doesn't make them leave. And they pay for their stupidity when the slasher the audience has been expecting shows up and starts knocking them off.

In between death scenes, these characters toss around some of the worst dialogue and make some of the dumbest decisions you could ever see in a horror movie. When people say they don't like horror because movies in the genre are "stupid", Deadly Manor is the sort of movie they're talking about. The characters do some things that are mind-boggling, they're so dumb.

Larraz passed away years ago, so he's not around to defend Deadly Manor, but I would really like to know how he could possibly think he made a better movie with this one than he did with Edge of the Axe.