Shark in Venice

I want to tell you that Shark in Venice is good. That it lives up to the promise of its title. That – I don’t know – it’s better than Shark Attack 2 or something.

I can’t.

It sucks.

Take a look at this scene from around halfway through, when Stephen Baldwin’s character is shark-attacked while diving in the canal:















I’m sure you noticed that Le Shark seemed to be having a good old chew on Stephen. There’s lots of blood in the water and, oh yeah, HIS LEG CAME OFF. Well, unfortunately, none of the producers seemed to notice this small detail because, in the very next scene, The Littlest Baldwin is happily walking around on two legs again.* Now, I’ve never lost a leg, thankfully, but I’m fairly certain they don’t grow back. At least, not by the next day.

[* There’s a possible suggestion that Baldwin dreamed this whole attack, but he was in the water and he does end up in hospital, so that doesn’t make any real sense either.]

It’s this kind of annoying detail – whether it’s bad editing or filmmaking-by-committee or whatever – that sums up Shark in Venice’s lack of effort in general. Interviewed in the DVD’s making-of featurette, the cast go on about how the movie’s just meant to be undemanding fun for the viewer. But, really... sloppy shark attacks consisting of nature footage, red filters, lots of splashing and incoherent clips from Shark Attack 2? Where’s the fun in that?

Anyway, on to the plot. Stephen Baldwin is – don’t laugh – Doctor David Franks, an oceanography professor with a permanently glazed expression and really bad dress sense. Seriously, it looks like the wardrobe department put in even less effort than the editor:





David is called to Venice, where his scuba diving father has apparently been killed in a “suspicious boating accident”. You know, the kind with teeth-marks. David correctly identifies the mangled mannequin as his dad and goes on to the bonus round vows to find out what really happened, with the help of girlfriend Laura, played by Scarlett Johansson’s sister Vanessa. What has all this got to do with (a) Mafia henchmen, (b) rogue sharks and (c) the Medici Treasure? Well, it turns out that (a) Mafia henchmen have released (b) rogue sharks to guard (c) the Medici Treasure. There you go. Someone saved your life tonight.... Well, 90 minutes of it, anyway. So don’t say I never do anything for you.

The problem with Shark in Venice – or, rather, the overriding problem – is that it just doesn’t care. Some digital compositors came up with this:



and this:





...so that the makers would have something to show to the investors and hopefully raise enough money to get a film made, and that’s where the interest in filmmaking stopped. As far as Venetian shark mayhem goes, the above scenes are literally everything you get. The budget didn’t even cover the costs of flying the principal cast members to Italy, so all you see is a shot of Stephen Baldwin pointing:



followed by a shaky camcorder shot of this:



Yes, Shark in Venice hates you. Do not watch it!

Rating: 1/5

MythBusting

So I’m just minding my own business at my nightly slumber party, making s’mores and playing with my ouija board (which is actually quite difficult to do simultaneously) when a friend says to me, “Hey Ross, have you heard the story of Dead Mary?”

“Dead Mary?” says I through a mouthful of melted marshmallow and ouija board splinters (told you it was difficult). “Don’t you mean Bloody Mary, the scary old ghost-woman who appears if you say her name five times in front of a mirror... and who then proceeds to - gasp! - kill you?”

“No,” replies said nameless friend, “I mean Dead Mary, the dreadful movie that appears if you walk into a video shop and say the words ‘Dead Mary’ once in front of a store clerk... and which then proceeds to - gasp! - suck out your very soul and take a big poop on it for 103 minutes.”

“Gosh-a-lordy!” I exclaim. “That sounds terrifying. What a disturbing urban legend. Is it true?”

And, dear friends, I'm sorry to report that it was true.


* If you or any member of your family have been affected by any of the issues discussed in this post, head on over to Amanda By Night’s Made for TV Mayhem blog and read her wonderful list of the Top 10 TV movies of the 70s... It's a sure-fire cure-all for all that ails ye!

Cheerleader Massacre

Well, that’ll teach me. You play with fire often enough and eventually you get burned... Or, in this case, you get slowly roasted to death, as flaming hot pokers thrust themselves in and out of your eye sockets, and burning embers become lodged underneath your fingernails in most uncomfortable fashion. Yessiree, I’ve made one too many trips to the Grindhouse with this one.

Cheerleader Massacre is possibly-officially the fourth film in the Slumber Party Massacre series. How can this be? you fret. It features no slumber party... not even the merest hint of a topless pillow-fight. Well, if you remember, Part 2 was only linked to the original by the tenuous suggestion that its main character was the sister of Part 1’s heroine. And Part 3 wasn’t linked at all, although it did at least centre around a slumber party. Cheerleader Massacre boasts a cameo appearance from Part 1’s Brinke Stevens, ostensibly playing the same character, “Linda”. Flashbacks cobbled together from old clips reveal that “Linda” – assumed perforated to pieces in The Slumber Party Massacre – actually survived her ordeal and has been living with the scars ever since. However, since liberties have been taken with the name of the killer – changed from the original Russ Thorn (scary!) to Jeremiah McPherson (terrifying!) – it’s perhaps up to you how seriously you want to take this new information. Personally, I’d suggest not taking anything in Cheerleader Massacre seriously. In fact, I’d suggest not watching it.

After the obligatory lovemaking-kids-killed-in-the-woods opening, we’re introduced to the Bridgemont High cheerleading squad, happily practising their latest routine in jeans and blouses (what, you expect a film like this to pay for a luxury like costumes?). In comes their coach, Miss Hendricks, to tell them that they have fifteen minutes to shower and get on the bus. Naturally, we follow them into the showers, where the camera lingers lustfully over their soapy buttocks (another bit of continuity with the original there). The whole scene does drag on a bit, though… I mean, these girls only have fifteen minutes to get ready. Give them a break!

Eventually, it’s enough with the nudity and time for some killin’ – and here’s where I really began to worry. The following scene is such nonsense that it’s clear once and for all that Cheerleader Massacre is far more concerned with t&a than s&s (that’s stalk and slash). One cheerleader, Dina, is separated from the pack and finds herself all alone in the spooky locker room. A POV shot from behind some lockers suggests she’s being stalked by an observer close by. Suddenly, the lights go off – apparently a clue to Dina that she’s about to be killed because she instantly dives behind a bank of lockers. Peering out, she sees a scary-looking shadow on the wall at the other end of the enormous room. Then, a shower jet bursts on behind her. (Obviously, the killer has some kind of remote control.) Dina slips into a storeroom area, where a hand clamps around her mouth from behind and she’s dragged away. Cut to the shower slowly switching itself off... Either there are about three different killers, all hiding in different parts of the locker room (with one controlling the showers) or this scene makes absolutely no sense. I suspect the latter.

The last we see of Dina is her feet beneath a toilet stall door as blood drips onto her shoes. I say “drips” but it’s actually more like “squirts”... Seriously, I don’t know what’s going on behind that door but the blood is squirting downwards in a very directional flow, as if from a hosepipe. If you’ve seen that other another t&a slasher travesty Sorority House Massacre II (in which you could often see the shadow of the squeezy-bottle used whenever splashing blood was required) this should be enough to clue you in that the director here is again Jim Wynorski. Having watched his enjoyable-enough 976-EVIL II recently, I was prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt, but never again, Mr Wynorski... never again!

There’s a few more deaths, one involving a rope bridge, which produced the only moment of suspense I experienced while watching the film: as the killer cuts through one of the ropes holding the bridge in place, I wondered if we’d actually get to see it collapse... Of course, we don’t. That would have involved a budget. Instead, the actress shakes the bridge as much as possible until a blurry camera pan simulates her fall.

It all ends up with the cheerleaders trapped in a snowbound cabin while the killer prowls the woods outside. It’s here that the film’s key scene is played out: a three-way naked hot-tub session in which the girls pour bottles of Hershey’s chocolate syrup over themselves (again with the squeezy-bottles!). This might have sounded like a sexy scene on paper but, in reality, it’s so gross I almost couldn’t watch. Quite frankly, nothing that turns your bathwater brown is good clean fun in my book.

I did enjoy a few snippets of the script, however:

Cop: I knew today was gonna suck when we got those stale donuts.

Generic cheerleader 1: This is so bad... No gas, no food...
Generic cheerleader 2: And they still haven’t caught that killer yet!

Cop 1: This is gonna be a long day.
Cop 2: Yeah, except for one thing... It isn’t day anymore.

Cheerleader (searching cabin): I couldn’t find a phone – but there’s plenty of games to play!

Other than those, I can’t find a single basis on which to recommend Cheerleader Massacre. It’s as bad as cheap exploitation gets, and a far cry from the witty and well made Slumber Party Massacre trilogy with which it’s feebly linked. I think I'll be staying away from the Grindhouse for a while!

Rating: 1/5

Title fight! Scream Bloody Murder

Going through my pile of as-yet-unwatched DVDs last night, I discovered I had two films with the same title. Now, life is confusing enough without this kind of malarkey... I mean, who hasn’t sat the kids down to watch Fletch, only to discover they’ve accidentally slipped Andy Warhol’s Flesh into the machine? And I don’t even want to think about the disastrous screening of Kramer vs. Kramer I put my elderly grandmother through (there’s barely anything on that box to distinguish it from Freddy vs. Jason). Nope, you don’t need me to tell you that title-sharing is a bad idea.

So, what is one to do when faced with two films with exactly the same name? And what title could be so enticing, so powerful, so intriguing that there’s more than one movie vying for it? Well, I’ll tell you... it’s Scream Bloody Murder. Isn’t it just... chilling? All that screaming and blood, not to mention the murder. I bet it’s a real shocker. Trouble is, which film deserves it? There’s only room for one Scream Bloody Murder in my collection, and only one way to settle the dispute... Ding-ding! Title fight!

The first contender for the title Scream Bloody Murder is Marc B. Ray’s 1973 film – we’ll call it SBM’73 – about a disturbed young man who embarks on a killing spree across California. Matthew (Fred Holbert) has been in an asylum since childhood, when he ran over his father in a combine harvester. Now he’s out, he has a hook for a hand (thanks to the same incident) and he’s not happy. The root cause of all this anger is the fact that his mom’s remarried, so he shows his disapproval by hacking up the new husband with an axe – and then accidentally killing Ma for good measure. From here on in, it’s meet-greet-slaughter, as Matthew does away with just about everyone who crosses his path, spurred on by visions of his dead mother. Most of his victims scream, it’s all very bloody, and peppered with murder... Sounds like a strong contender, huh? Let’s meet the competition.

Ralph E. Portillo’s Scream Bloody Murder is a straight-to-video slasher move from 2000. We’ll refer to it as SBM2000 to distinguish it from the 1973 film and make it sound a bit like a vacuum cleaner. Its heroine is “Jewels” (short for Julie – sheesh, this one’s already losing points), who arrives at the remote Camp Placid Pines to work as a counsellor over the summer. But rumours are rife that a killer named Trevor Moorehouse stalks the surrounding woods and, when her colleagues start disappearing one by one, she begins to believe there might be some truth to them. Let’s see how the movie stacks up against its rival...

Round 1: The title card

No contest here: SBM2000 pits some random trees and a generic title font against SBM’73’s shocking freeze-frame of a screaming child with a mangled hand! You can almost see the blood dripping off the screen. Winner: SBM’73

Round 2: The psychopath

Both killers are pretty freaky: Amish hair and a hatchet is not a combination I’d like to come up against but, as madmen go, SBM’73’s Matthew is a little on the weedy side. On the other hand, Trevor of SBM2000 sports Jason’s mask, Leatherface’s chainsaw and Michael Myers’ boiler suit... He’s a one-man fashion parade of horror. As the camera panned behind him, however, that’s when I knew we were really in trouble...

Yes, Trevor Moorehouse has pooped himself, people. Now that’s disturbing. Here is a killer so psychotic that he doesn’t even drop ’em to drop one off. On the plus side, I can’t see him creeping up behind you unannounced, if you get my drift. Still, to be quite honest, I don’t want him anywhere near me – and that’s surely the best compliment you can pay a movie psycho. Winner: SBM2000

Round 3: The action (Spoilers!)

It would be accurate enough to describe both Scream Bloody Murders as slasher movies, although SBM’73 is a more character-focused piece, while SBM2000 is a standard run-around-the-woods hack-’em-up. Both are highly reminiscent of other films, the difference being that SBM’73 lays down the conventions that many others would later follow (1980’s Maniac is an obvious descendant) while SBM2000 simply copies superior predecessors like Friday the 13th and Madman.

Both films also feature a fairly equal amount of murder and mayhem, but only SBM’73 had me in any way cringing. Its gore is mainly limited to bright crimson blood splashing around, but Matthew’s attacks (particularly with the hatchet) are so frenzied, they come across as quite brutal. In contrast, the deaths in SBM2000 are largely bloodless and often off-screen (whereas the only off-screen killing in SBM’73 is that of a dog – although it’s still a distressing moment, especially the way it makes Matthew cry).

As for the fate of each killer... SBM’73’s climax finds Matthew inside a church, assailed by visions of his former victims who proceed to hack him to pieces, culminating in a gob-smacking final shot. At the end of SBM2000, the killer is, er, handcuffed and driven away (...or is he? Hmm). Winner: SBM’73

Rating

SBM’73 is a nasty, engrossing little grindhouse pic that still manages to disturb despite its age, grainy shape and sometimes dawdling pace. 3/5

SBM2000 is a witless clone of better slashers, with characters you couldn’t care less about, long stretches of tedium, and a convoluted but ineffective climax. 1/5

The winner!

SBM’73, you really deserve the title Scream Bloody Murder and you’re welcome to hang around in my DVD collection as long as you like. SPM2000, you need a new title. I suggest The Poopy-Pants Murders.