Alternate Takes 10.25.08: Saw V

Posted by Shawn S. Lealos on 10.25.2008

On the heals of the next edition of the Saw franchise, Alternate Takes looks back at the heyday of the slasher film.




Hello and welcome to Week 25 of Alternate Takes. My name is Shawn S. Lealos.

Trucking on along in the Top 5 list. TWO WEEKS IN A ROW!!!! The Top 5 Most Horrific Non-Horror Movies - And I stand by my argument that Seven and Silence of the Lambs are police thrillers, not horror movies.

And here is my review for W.

J.D. Dunn has a fantastic column going where he looks at 31 horror movies. Check out his latest reviews here: Pumpkinhead, Chopping Mall, Jurassic Park, and Silence of the Lambs. There are many more. Check them all out!


And here .. we .. go ...



SAW V


Directed by David Hackl
Cast: Tobin Bell, Scott Patterson, Betsy Russell, Julie Benz, Meagan Good

It's Halloween time again, so that means it is time for another installment of Saw. It is impressive that the movie has been like clockwork every year when not even the Halloween film series could accomplish that feat. To catch you up, Jigsaw (Tobin Bell) is dead. In Saw V, a copycat killer is taking over the mantle and sets up a number of puzzles and booby traps to torment a new group of victims. Saw is best known for kicking the torture porn genre into full motion. I would argue there is much more to the series than just torture horror and a lot beneath the surface makes it as psychologically scary as gore inducing. The third and fourth movies were even more impressive once I watched the fourth and saw how it completely worked within the framework of the third. However, I still watch these new releases and miss the days of old. I grew up in the 80's and love the horror icons of old, the slasher genre that includes hulking behemoths, dream killers and psycho dolls. This week in Alternate Takes I take a journey back in time to the era of slasher films and the films that defined the genre.




Five Alternate Takes

HALLOWEEN (1978)

Directed by John Carpenter
Cast: Donald Pleasence, Jamie Lee Curtis, Nancy Loomis, P.J. Soles, Charles Cyphers, Kyle Richards

Following J.D. Dunn's great write up of Rob Zombie's recent updating of Halloween, I want to take the chance to go back and look at the one that started it all. Of course, the movie that really seemed to start it all (after Psycho) was 1974's Black Christmas. Believe it or not, Halloween was originally supposed to be a sequel to Black Christmas, but John Carpenter and his writing partner Debra Hill took it in a different direction. The movie preys on the fears of the young audience, making the victims regular kids, one of which is a babysitter. How hard must it have been for girls to babysit alone on a late night after seeing this movie? The monster was not a monster. There were no supernatural elements in the first movie. The killer was just a man who we saw at the beginning as just a young boy. He is not an indestructible super monster, but a killer who bleeds when stabbed, can be stopped by bullets but simply refuses to die. What makes this original effort scarier than the recent Rob Zombie film is the fact you don't know anything about Michael Myers. He is a mysterious man who kills for no apparent reason. He could be anyone, anywhere, and there seems to be no rules or regulations to predict his transformation from child to killer. The remake creates a sympathetic background for the character and you almost feel sorry for him as his own sister rejects him at the end. In the original, there are no sympathies for the killer. He is a faceless aperture who arrives on the scene and kills. The sequels present us with the reasons for his killing spree, but in the original you don't even know Laurie is his sister. With no back story and no real understanding of the man behind the mask, the original remains one of the scariest movies ever made.

I met him, fifteen years ago. I was told there was nothing left. No reason, no conscience, no understanding; even the most rudimentary sense of life or death, good or evil, right or wrong. I met this six-year-old child, with this blank, pale, emotionless face and, the blackest eyes... the devil's eyes. I spent eight years trying to reach him, and then another seven trying to keep him locked up because I realized what was living behind that boy's eyes was purely and simply...evil.


FRIDAY THE 13th (1980)

Directed by Sean S. Cunningham
Cast: Betsy Palmer, Adrienne King, Harry Crosby, Laurie Bartram, Kevin Bacon

The following write-up contains a major spoiler for the movie. Read at your own risk. Friday the 13th is a movie that owes its entire existence to John Carpenter and Halloween. From the title effects to the visual effects to the cast of characters, it shamelessly lifts elements from the earlier, better film. However, there are a number of moments in the movie that helps it rise above a simple rehashing and into a classic of its own. The view of the victims from the perspective of the killer is a classic sequence that has been lifted itself by a large numbers of copycat films since its inception. While the score for Halloween, and the motif for Michael Myers in particular is easily identifiable, the sound motif for the killer in Friday the 13th, a sound of breathing, amped up and distorted, is also iconic and easily recognizable to anyone today, whether they have seen the movie or not. I continuously say the killer, because as anyone knows who has seen the movie, Jason Vorhees is not the killer in Friday the 13th. The killer was Jason's mother, punishing negligent camp counselors for the sins of those who allowed her son to drown years before. It is another movie not supernatural in any way, the killer simply a crazed, deranged woman, hell bent on vengeance. Some argue the final scene, when the scarred body leaps out of the water and pulls the "survivor girl" under, give it a supernatural slant. I argue that was only a dream sequence, lifted directly out of the Brian De Palma film Carrie. The scene was completely out of place in the movie and I think it was used as a simple final jump scare for the audience. The creature that pulled the girl under was small and scarred, and looked nothing like the large muscular Jason Vorhees we would see in the sequels. That brings me to my final point about the greatness of this film - the effects work of Tom Savini. While most know him from his work with George Romero and Dawn of the Dead, he created some truly gruesome and bloody effects in this movie as well. So many movies tried to copy this, with Sleepaway Camp the most obvious example, none have matched up to the inventiveness of the original.

You see, Jason was my son, and today is his birthday...


NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET (1984)

Directed by Wes Craven
Cast: John Saxon, Ronee Blakley, Heather Lagenkamp, Johnny Depp, Robert Englund

Wes Craven had made his name with horror classics Last House on the Left and The Hills Have Eyes. He was coming off two critically panned efforts, the sequel to Hills and the Swamp Thing adaptation, and wanted to make something more personal. The script he wrote was based off two things. The first was a batch of news clippings he had been saving. He read numerous newspapers every morning and noticed a strange case of unexplained deaths from the Los Angeles Times in 1981. People were complaining to family members about horrible dreams, each worst than the last. They refused to go back to sleep and when they finally did fall asleep again, they died. Craven became interested in this idea, a dream killer, and using a memory he had from childhood created Freddy Krueger. When Craven was a child, he looked out his second story bedroom window one night and saw a man standing out front of his house. He wore a red and green striped shirt and eventually realized he was being watched. He looked up and returned Craven's stare, scaring the poor kid to death. This figure from Craven's childhood memory became the child killer Freddy, returning from the dead and seeking vengeance on the children of the people who killed him. The first thing that makes this scary is the killer is not a man who had been wronged. He was a murderer of children, possibly with a basis on the Fritz Lang killer in M. Just as in that early expressionist era film, Krueger was hunted down, not by the law, but by the citizens and tried and found guilty for his crimes. While the killer in M would be saved by the police, Freddy would not and was burned to death like a witch from the Salem trials. Krueger is a brilliant creation, trumping both Michael Myers and Jason Vorhees in the process. While those two killers are faceless brutes, set out to methodically kill everyone in their path, Freddy is more sinister. He is a sicker, demented creature, showing glee and nasty, perversity while stalking and killing the kids. He would grow into a more comical character over the films, but in the first he preys on the weakness of the kids and seems thrilled almost as much with the torture as the kill. The fact the only way to escape him is to stay awake is horrifying and everything from the children's sing-a-long, another homage to M, to the old jump scare at the end with a comic twist makes Nightmare on Elm Street the coolest in the subgenre of slasher films.

One, two, Freddy's coming for you. / Three, four, better lock your door. / Five, six, grab your crucifix. / Seven, eight, better stay awake. / Nine, ten, never sleep again.


CHILD'S PLAY (1988)

Directed by Tom Holland
Cast: Catherine Hicks, Chris Sarandon, Alex Vincent, Brad Dourif

"Hi, I'm Chucky and I'm your friend to the end!" I don't really know what it is, but something about the direction of this movie still scares the crap out of me. The storyline is pretty hokey. Brad Dourif is Charles Lee Ray, The Lakeside Strangler. He is chased down and eventually is shot and killed by Detective Mike Norris but, before he dies, chants an incantation that transports his spirit into a "Good Guy Doll". The doll then goes after the men responsible for his death, while tormenting the family that now owns the doll. The movie is ludicrous (how does a doll leave teeth prints?) but, as I said, it is scary as hell. The pacing is solid and the scares deliver, which is surprising since director Tom Holland hasn't done anything else worthwhile before or since. I would say the cinematography of Bill Butler (Jaws, Frailty) is the reason for this more than the director. However, I can't discount the tremendous acting performance he got out of young Alex Vincent (seven years old). The point when Chucky stops being a mysterious doll and becomes a Brad Dourif voiced doll, the movie slips into generic slasher mode, but everything leading up to this is GOLD. There are a couple of crappy sequels but the franchise rejuvenated itself with the awesome horror/comedies Bride of Chucky and Seed of Chucky.

His real name is Charles Lee Ray and he's been sent down from Heaven by daddy to play with me.


SCREAM (1996)

Directed by Wes Craven
Cast: David Arquette, Neve Campbell, Courtney Cox, Skeet Ulrivh, Rose McGowan, Matthew Lillard, Jamie Kennedy, Drew Barrymore, Live Schreiber

I would be remiss not to include the movie that sounded the death knoll for the slasher genre. I would like to point out how a parody like Scream ties into so many genres in film history. The classic Universal monsters were the cocks of the walk through the ‘30s. However by the late ‘40s, there were rehashes of the movies that were once so great. The great Bride of Frankenstein, Dracula and Wolf Man movies were being carried on with lackluster efforts like House of Frankenstein and the many X Meets Y movies. The death knoll was finally sounded with the release of Abbott and Costello Meets Frankenstein, one of the few parodies where the spoof remained loyal and true to the spirit of the original characters. The western was dominant from the ‘30s through the ‘60s, but as the ‘60s neared a close, the western efforts were no longer as popular as they once were. Blazing Saddles was released during this time and the spoof almost completely marked the end the once popular genre, with the rare exception of a movie here and there. The slasher movies were the rave of horror cinema throughout the ‘80s but by the time we reached the ‘90s, it was growing old. It was a ripe time for a spoof to finally send the subgenre to its grave. Who better to helm this effort then one of the pioneers of the slasher flicks, Wes Craven? Just like Abbott and Costello Meets Frankenstein, Craven remained true to the spirit of the genre and gave us a send off that was actually entertaining as well. He practiced the effort in the self-referential, and excellent Wes Craven's New Nightmare, which became a template for this more popular movie. Scream paid homage to the true originator of the genre, Alfred Hitchcock, by killing off the more popular actor (Barrymore) in the very beginning of the film, setting the tone that no one is safe. He also paid reference to the ticks and traits of a slasher picture by using the character of Randy (Kennedy) to voice the "slasher movie rules" to the other kids as the murders began. This first of the eventual trilogy is a creative and solid horror movie that both pays its great respects to its source material and proves to be a solid sendoff to the fun and entertaining genre.

Now Sid, don't you blame the movies, movies don't create psychos, movies make psychos more creative!