Centerfold Girls (1974)

Centerfold Girls was made in 1974 and it can be considered as an early slasher movie, before the slasher movie genre had coalesced into its classic form.

Director John Peyser had a very long career in television although he worked intermittently on feature films in various capacities. Centerfold Girls is an aberration in his career - it’s his only foray into horror and it’s his only foray into exploitation film-making.

Centerfold Girls is about a serial killer who kills nude models. At one point he calls himself Clement Dunne although whether that’s his real name is not entirely clear but for convenience we’ll refer to him by that name. Dunne obviously has some serious issues with women and some serious hangups about sex. He has concentrated all his obsessive hatreds on nude models. We’re not specifically told that his motivations are religious, although it might well be possible. It might just be a product of his fear of women and his shame and guilt about sex.

He has decided to go through a nudie calendar from a girlie magazine and kill the twelve featured models one by one.

As the movie opens he has already killed once. We see him disposing of the body. He seems emotionless. Perhaps killing has temporarily emptied him out psychologically. He treats the body like a slab of meat. It’s a fairy chilling scene.

The rest of the movie comprises three distinct segments, almost mini-movies, the connecting link between them being that each one involves Dunne in stalking one of the calendar girls.

Jackie is a nude model but she has a daytime job as well. She’s a nurse. She’s applied for a position as nurse at an isolated summer camp. On her way there she encounters a hippie chick who seems lost and confused. She’s heading in the same direction as Jackie. Jackie takes pity on her and offer her a lift. That proves to be a big mistake. She makes an even bigger mistake by inviting the girl to stay the night. Jackie is staying in a luxury house modern house owned by one of her relatives.

This was the time of hippie hysteria. In the wake of the Manson murders many people believed that murderous gangs of hippies were roaming the country, leaving behind them a trail of terror and violence.

The hippie chick’s hippie friends, a man and two women, turn up and subject Jackie to a night of humiliation and terror, topped off with rape. Jackie is therefore relieved the next day when a kindly neighbour shows up and offers to drive her home. Unfortunately the kindly neighbour is in fact Clement Dunne.

In the second segment a motley assortment of people set off for a weekend in an isolated house on an island. The house is luxurious enough but the generator doesn’t work so there’s no electricity. There’s also no telephone. The group includes three nude models. They’ll be doing a series of photo shoots. Also along is a photographer and an older couple who handle the business side.

They don’t know that Clement Dunne is on the island as well. His target is Charly, one of the models.

It seems as though by the time Dunne is finished there won’t be anybody left alive on the island.

In the the third segment Dunne has a new target, Vera. She’s an airline stewardess and part-time girlie magazine model.

Vera knows she is being stalked. In fact Dunne makes sure that all his victims know that they’re being stalked. She decides to leave town and hide out in a motel. Her car breaks down and like Jackie she makes the mistake of trusting strangers. As a result she gets raped. She’s so relieved when a mild-mannered travelling salesman gives her a lift. The salesman is of course Clement Dunne.

I think it’s a mistake to try to see this as either a feminist or an anti-feminist movie. It has no political axe to grind. It does take a very sympathetic view of the nude models. They’re nice girls. They’re not nuns and they’re not promiscuous. They’re just ordinary.

Of course the subject matter offers the opportunity to add lots of nudity. And there’s a great deal of nudity in this movie, although no frontal nudity.

The nudity is taken for granted. The fact that the female characters pose nude is not treated as a big deal. There’s no hint of moral condemnation of any of the female targets of Dunne’s hatred. There are characters in the movie deserving of moral condemnation but the nude models are not among them.

Some of the features of the classic slasher movie are already in place here but there are some differences from later movies in the genre. The victims are not teenagers. The violence isn’t graphic. It has shock value but this comes mostly from the obvious hatred displayed by Clement Dunne (which is aided by a nicely chilling performance by Andrew Prine as Dunne). And the shock value also comes from the terror and helplessness of the victims.

Peyser builds the suspense in each segment fairly effectively. The fate of the girls isn’t quite inevitable. It comes about in part as a result of errors of judgment on their part. Had they been a bit more cautious they might not have been in such danger. We feel there’s always the chance they might escape. I’m not going to tell you if any of them do escape.

The movie was shot on 16mm film and probably never looked sensational. Dark Sky’s DVD release offers a transfer that is acceptable but far from pristine. There’s graininess and print damage. I don’t mind that. It adds to the scuzziness of the movie.

Centerfold Girls is interesting as a step on the road that led to the slasher movie craze. And it’s quite an effective movie, and it’s interesting structurally. Recommended.

Killer Barbys (1996)

Jess Franco kept making movies right up to the end of his life but in the 21st century his movies tended to be absolutely zero-budget and often shot on video, and more and more experimental. In 1996 however Franco was still making proper feature films. Killer Barbys (AKA Vampire Killer Barbys) is a real feature film (albeit shot on Super 16 film rather than 35mm).

Whether you enjoy this movie or not depends a lot on how you feel about the music. This is a horror movie but it’s also a punk rock movie with the soundtrack largely supplied by punk bands like the Killer Barbies. There’s a lot of punk music in this movie. If you hate that style of music you might have problems with the movie.

It’s worth pointing out that the band is called the Killer Barbies but the spelling of the title of the movie was changed to Killer Barbys to avoid problems with Mattel, the manufacturer of Barbie dolls. The company apparently didn’t have an objection to the spelling of the band’s name (throughout the movie they’re the Killer Barbies and that’s the name on their tour bus) but they might have balked at the spelling when it came to the movie.

The Killer Barbies don’t just provide the background music. They are central characters in the film. The lineup of the band in the movie is however not the actual band lineup. The two founding members of the band, Silvia Superstar and Billy King, appear in the movie but other band members are played by actors. This is understandable. The band members such as Mario (Charlie S. Chaplin) play very roles in the plot and have to actual acting.

The movie opens with the kind of scene that you get in countless Franco movies. Franco loved nightclub scenes, they tend to be very important thematically in his movies as well as contributing essential mood and I don’t think any other director has ever done so many superb and atmospheric nightclub scenes. The difference here is that it’s not a jazz club but a punk rock club. But this is Jess Franco and he could make any nightclub scene effective.

The band that is performing is of course the Killer Barbies and after the gig they hit the road. Unfortunately their van breaks down but they get what seems to be a lucky break - a rather distinguished-looking old gentleman tells them that the castle of Countess Fledermaus is nearby and the countess would be happy to give them shelter for the night. They can get their van repaired in the morning. This is of course a classic horror movie setup and while this movie is many other things as well it’s clear that Franco intended it be a classic gothic horror movie.

He lays on the gothic atmosphere good and think and it works. The Killer Barbies have left the modern urban world of punk clubs and now they’re in gothic horror movie world. They’re very much fish out of water.

Three of the band members (including Flavia which is the name given to the character played by Silvia Superstar in the movie) enthusiastically take up the offer of accommodation for the night. The other two band members, Billy and Sharon (Los Angeles Barea) are too busy having sex in the back of the van even to notice that the van is no longer moving.

We know that bad things are going to happen because we’ve seen the countess. She looks like she’s more than a hundred years old, because she is more than a hundred years old. She looks like a corpse that is somehow still breathing. But her faithful servant Arkan (Aldo Sambrell) who is clearly in love with her isn’t worried. Thanks to the arrival of the band they now have an ample supply of fresh blood. The countess (who was a famous singer many many years earlier) can be restored to her youthful beauty. So this is a vampire movie of sorts. And the countess will indeed have her beauty restored.

The question of course is whether any of the Killer Barbies are going to get out of this alive.

Franco was not keen on gore but there is a fair bit of it in this movie. There is some nudity and sex but not as much as you might expect in a Franco film.

The plot is not wildly original but what matters in a Franco movie is what he does with it. And in this case he’s made an odd and interesting movie in which the clash between the world of the present and the world of the past is a major focus. There is of course also a clash between the living and the dead, or rather the undead. The extreme youth of the band members (Flavia claims to be nineteen) is therefore an appropriate touch.

There’s a very creepy retainer named Baltasar at the castle. He has two midgets whom he thinks of as his boys). They seem to be cannibals. They’re certainly quite insane. Arkan is insane as well but in a very different way. His insanity is his obsession with the countess (who has been driven both mad and evil by the loss of her youthful beauty). He combines insanity with dignity and devotion.

Everything takes place at night and if you go for shadows and fog you’ll be in bliss. As usual Franco has found some fine locations.

This movie is clearly inspired more by the the real-life Hungarian Countess Erzsébet Báthory than by vampires. Báthory is alleged to have had hundreds of virgin girls killed so she could bathe in their blood and she was the subject of Hammer’s 1971 Countess Dracula as well as one of the segments of Walerian Borowczyk’s Immoral Tales (1973). The countess is Killer Barbys is played by Mariangela Giordano, a fine actress who really puts her all into her performance. She was 59 years old at that time and she spends a good deal of her screen time naked (and looks remarkably good). She was an interesting casting choice, emphasising theme of the battle between age and youth and the countess’s determination not to let go of youth, and not to let go of her sexuality. She really is the standout performer in this movie.

Aldo Sambrell gives a surprisingly nuanced performance in a movie not noted for its nuance. Of the younger cast members Silvia Superstar is the most convincing and has definite screen presence and energy.

If you are not very familiar with Franco’s work (or totally unfamiliar with it) do not under any circumstances see this movie until you’ve seen at least a couple of dozen of his other movies. This film will give you a totally distorted and misleading impression of Franco as a film-maker. For one thing this is Franco in a jokey mood. He made plenty of very serious movies but this is not one of them. In Killer Barbys he’s spoofing gore movies and slasher movies. It’s all very tongue-in-cheek. This was also an attempt to re-establish his commercial credentials. It includes plenty of elements that should have worked commercially - the slasher film references, various pop culture references, the gore effects that are clearly intended to be amusing rather than shocking. And of course punk rock. It’s a kind of goofy punk comic-book take on the slasher genre.

A lot of Franco fans hate this movie and it certainly doesn’t compare to his great movies of the 60s, 70s and 80s. But if you accept that Franco really was intending this movie as a good-natured joke then it’s kind of fun. Worth a look for experienced Franco fans.

Redemption’s DVD offers a good transfer with an audio commentary by Troy Howarth.

Double Exposure (1982)

Double Exposure is a low-budget 1982 erotic thriller (with definite slasher movie overtones) released by Crown International.

It starts with a stake-out that goes really badly wrong. The cops are trying to catch a psycho killer who’s been preying on prostitutes but what they end up with is a dead undercover cop.

Then we switch to a psychiatrist’s office where Adrian Wilde (Michael Callan) is trying to work through his problems with women. When he leaves the office he runs into Mindy Jordache (Joanna Pettet) in the lift. He starts coming on to her and he does it in such a creepy way that we can see why he might be having a few problems with the ladies.

Adrian has bad dreams. Really bad dreams. Bad violent dreams. Sometimes he thinks the dreams are real. Obviously the audience is also supposed to be unsure whether the dreams are just dreams.

Despite the ineptness of his approach Mindy agrees to a dinner date with Adrian. Things seem like they’re going fairly well between them.

Adrian’s brother B.J. is a stunt driver. A car accident left him with one arm and one leg, and a bad attitude. But the brothers will do anything to help each other.

Mind you most of the people in this movie have a few problems. Mindy’s a nice person but maybe her judgment isn’t as good as she thinks it is.

Even Adrian’s psychiatrist has a few problems. His biggest problem is that he thinks Adrian is harmless but he’s not sure.

Adrian is a photographer. He photographs women. A lot of his dreams involve photography. Of course the kind of photography he does is kind of on the borderland between dream and fantasy.

There are lots more dreams, and lots more murders. The most promising lead for the two cops working the case, Sergeant Fontain (Pamela Hensley) and Sergeant Buckhold (David Young), is a sleazy bar frequented by a strange assortment of models, hookers and misfits. The main attraction at this bar is mud-wrestling. Fontain and Buckhold aren’t stupid but they make slow progress. They do find one interesting clue, which suggests that somebody was taking photographs near the murder scene. To the audience that obviously points to Adrian as the killer, except for the fact that at least three other characters are either professional or amateur photographers.

There’s some very effective suspense. We know that Mindy is acquainted with all the likely suspects and as the movie progresses it’s more and more obvious that she’s in real danger.

The killings are not just gruesome but cleverly and imaginatively staged and genuinely shocking.

For a low-budget release this film has a more than OK cast. Michael Callan and Joanna Pettet were not exactly A-listers but they were not complete nobodies either. They’re both impressive. In fact the acting overall is a lot better than you’d expect. It’s interesting to see Cleavon Little in a totally straight role as a hardbitten police lieutenant.

What sets this film apart from the average slasher film is that it attempts some real psychological complexity. We’re not just waiting to find out the identity of the killer - we’re even more interested in the motivation, and in the motivation of the other characters as well. Double Exposure can be sen as an attempt to make an intelligent slasher movie and the remarkable thing is that it mostly succeeds.

There are also some genuine surprises. Characters don’t always do what we’re expecting them to do. And the blurring of the line between dream and reality is handled quite well.

Writer-director William Byron Hillman and Michael Callan (who co-produced the movie) had made an earlier movie together, The Photographer, dealing with very similar themes. Double Exposure essentially takes the same basic ideas but apparently deals with them rather differently (I haven’t seen The Photographer so I’m only going on what I’ve heard about it).

Crown International released the movie briefly and then dumped it which was rather unfortunate (and unjust). It has however developed something of a cult following.

This movie is included in the excellent Mill Creek Drive-In Cult Classics 32 Movie Collection. The transfer is anamorphic and reasonably good. That’s the version I watched. It’s also had a Blu-Ray release from Vinegar Syndrome.

Double Exposure is a superior slasher movie and it works as a genuine psychological thriller as well. It’s ambitious and generally well-crafted and well-acted. It’s a movie that arguably deserves more attention than it’s received. Highly recommended.

Psycho III (1986)

By 1986 Anthony Perkins was facing up to the fact that if he wanted to get another starring role in a movie, and if he wanted a chance to direct (which he did), his only option was going to be another Psycho sequel. Which is why we have Psycho III.

There are two things that need to be said upfront about this movie. If you haven’t seen Psycho II you definitely won’t have the remotest idea what’s going on. And Psycho III contains major spoilers for Psycho II. So you absolutely must watch Psycho II first.

Which also means I’m going to have to be a bit vague at times about the plot outlines of the third film since I don’t want to be responsible for spoiling the second film. There are many references to the events of Psycho II which I’m not going to discuss and since they’re they’re the least satisfactory feature of the movie perhaps it’s just as well to ignore them.

The movie opens with a prologue which is an homage to a Hitchcock film, but it’s an homage to Vertigo rather than Psycho. It tells us some very disturbing things about a nun named Maureen Coyle (Diana Scarwid) and most of all it tells us why she isn’t a nun any more.

Norman Bates is back once again running the Bates Motel. He has been declared cured. Surprisingly enough the small local community has accepted him. Norman may have killed a whole bunch of people but apart from that he’s a nice enough guy and people feel sorry for him. However horrible his crimes may have been he has paid a very high price for them and he has shown considerable courage in attempting to take up his life again in the same community.

Now some disruptive elements have entered his life. Three people have arrived in the town. One is journalist Tracy Venable (Roberta Maxwell). One is a would-be rockstar named Duane Duke (Jeff Fahey). Duke gets a job as Norman’s assistant at the motel. The third and most unsettling is Maureen Coyle. What makes Maureen really unsettling to Norman is that she has her initials on her suitcase, M.C., which are of course Marion Crane’s initials. This not unnaturally upsets Norman a good deal.

You won’t be in the least surprised to hear that the Bates Motel is once again the scene of a series of horrific murders. Norman is of course suspected but the local sheriff is convinced that he is not the killer. The killings continue, while a strange emotional entanglement develops between Norman and Maureen.

The ending is disappointing, being just a bit too obvious.

Any Psycho sequel is going to have the problem that we already know about Norman and his mother. The subject of his mother can’t be ignored but it’s not easy to give it any real shock value. Psycho III solves this problem by putting much of the focus on Maureen Coyle. Maureen clearly has lots of issues. She is clearly, in her own way, just as crazy and confused and alienated from real life as Norman. And being a nun suddenly thrust into the everyday world she is obviously a woman with a less than relaxed attitude towards sex. In fact she’s as uncomfortable with that area of life as Norman.

What makes Maureen really interesting is that we have no idea what she’s going to do. Is she going to be just another victim? Is she going to start slicing and dicing people in Norman Bates style? Is she going to resolve her issues or keep spiralling downward? Is she going to send Norman totally insane again or is she going to help to redeem him?

She is also, like Norman, a person who seems to find impossible to escape her past.

There’s little point in saying that Anthony Perkins makes a good crazy person. We all know that. He does perhaps push things a bit too far at times. Roberta Maxwell plays the journalist Tracy as a woman with the morals of a rattlesnake and all the charm of an infected tooth. In other words, a typical journalist. The performance that really matters is Diana Scarwid’s. She has to make Maureen crazy and disconnected and generally weird and at the same time fascinating. She manages to do this fairly well. Jeff Fahey goes wildly over-the-top as Duane and adds appreciably to the movie’s high weirdness quotient. The Bates Motel is a real crazy person magnet in this film.

Of course this being the 80s Psycho III has a lot more overt gore than Hitchcock’s 1960 movie, and it has some gratuitous sex and nudity. These things were dictated by the commercial realities of the era and there’s nothing Perkins could have done about it. It’s also, naturally, widescreen and in colour. Again this was an unavoidable commercial reality.

In fact almost everything that is wrong with this film can be laid at the door of the studio. Perkins and screenwriter Charles Edward Pogue wanted to make a movie more concerned with the tragic emotional consequences of the events but the studio wanted a slasher movie. Ironically the movie was a commercial failure, which tends to happen when studio execs get to call the shots.

While there are things wrong with it there are also a lot of things right with Psycho III. Perhaps the movie’s greatest asset was Anthony Perkins, not as star but as director. He really does a fine job. The atmosphere of insanity and general wrongness, and at times out-and-out weirdness, is very impressively achieved. And while Perkins didn’t want to do it as a slasher film he handles the grisly murders with a surprising amount of style. Any Psycho sequel will obviously have to reference the shower scene in Hitchcock’s movie. Psycho III actually does this quite cleverly and quite effectively, and quite surprisingly. The other very famous Psycho set-piece is also referenced, and equally effectively.

The Region 4 DVD that I watched is an old release with no extras. The letterboxed  transfer is acceptable but not great. There's now a loaded-with-extras Blu-Ray release I believe.

Psycho III is far from being a complete success but it’s much better than its reputation would suggest and it’s actually not bad at all. Recommended.

Psycho II (1983)

Psycho II is, quite obviously, a sequel to Hitchcock’s 1960 masterpiece. Now personally I think that making a sequel to a Hitchcock movie is a seriously bad idea (just as remaking a Hitchcock movie is a seriously bad idea). The chances of falling flat on your face are just so overwhelmingly high. Nonetheless someone at Universal decided that a Psycho sequel would be a fine idea and Australian director Richard Franklin was given the assignment of directing it. It was originally intended as a TV movie but ended up getting a theatrical release (and doing well enough to lead to the making of Psycho III).

Franklin certainly nails his colours to the mast straight from the start. Psycho II not only opens with a clip from Hitchcock’s original, it opens with the famous shower scene in its entirety. Which means Franklin is really setting himself up to look foolish if he can’t deliver the goods. He certainly can’t be accused of trying to make things too easy for himself.

Psycho II takes up the story just over twenty years after the events of the first movie. Norman Bates (again played by Anthony Perkins) has been pronounced cured and released from the mental hospital in which he had been confined. Perhaps a little unwisely he’s decided to return to the Bates Motel. Even more unwisely his psychiatrist Dr Raymond (Robert Loggia) doesn’t seem to think this will be a problem.

The motel is being managed by the sleazy Warren Toomey (Dennis Franz). Norman has got himself a job in a local diner where he befriends waitress Mary (Meg Tilly). Norman isn’t exactly relaxed around women and given his incredible twitchiness plus the fact that Mary knows he’s been in a mental hospital it’s a little surprising that Mary moves into the Bates House after breaking up with her boyfriend.

Norman is pretty obviously becoming obsessed with Mary and he’s also started getting messages from his dead mother. Adding to Norman’s rapidly increasing anxiety levels is the vendetta that Warren Toomey launches against him after Norman fires him.

It’s not exactly a shock when the murders start happening. The local sheriff is however not convinced that Norman has gone back to his old habits. He’s not prepared to take any action without hard evidence and such evidence as he has is a long way from being conclusive.

Of course the murders haven’t stopped yet although the final body count is not particularly high by the standards of 80s slasher movies.

The problem for Norman is that he has no way of knowing if he’s responsible for these murders. He never did remember carrying out his original series of murders.

This movie begins very conventionally and with the kind of obviousness you expect in a TV movie. After it’s drifted along in this vein for a while Franklin clearly decides he’d better start doing something clever. If you’re going to attempt a Hitchcock sequel you’re going to have to pull off at least a couple of impressive visual set-pieces. The first murder is rather disappointing. The second though is extremely well done, and it’s in keeping with the tone of the original movie as well. On the whole Franklin does a fine job with some nice use of odd camera angles and lots of atmosphere.

Screenwriter Tom Holland faced a real problem. Anybody who had seen the first movie would already know the whole setup with Norman and his mother. A mere rerun of the same events would have been too obvious and entirely lacking in suspense. He had to find a way to keep within the framework established by the first movie whilst somehow convincing us that maybe this time events would follow a different course and that the final explanation might not be quite the same. He had to make us consider the possibility that maybe this time Norman wasn’t the killer, or then again maybe he was. This was certainly a challenge.

He meets that challenge reasonably well. The story keeps to the spirit of the original but with some completely new and startling twists. What’s perhaps most unexpected is that this movie plays fair with the viewer. The big surprise twist will surprise you but it shouldn’t since there have been numerous clues pointing in that direction. But then there’s some nice misdirection as well.

Tony Perkins is even twitchier this time around. He really goes all out with the crazy person stuff. It works because he does manage to make us feel sympathy for Norman as a man who thinks he has conquered his insanity but is now put under extreme stress - the twitchiness really is only to be expected.

Meg Tilly is pretty good. She manages to make Mary seem like the sort of girl who might well make a habit of befriending recovering serial killers. She has a certain innocence combined with an odd protectiveness towards Norman. The Norman-Mary relationship is certainly a bit strange but it’s weirdly touching and against the odds Perkins and Tilly make it seem convincing.

Obviously this film is not in the same league as Hitchcock’s film. Having said that it stands up as a fairly interesting variation on the slasher movie theme with less gore but more intelligence than most movies of that type. Overall it’s one of the better 80s horror movies. Recommended.