Grotesque (1988)

Lisa (Linda Blair) takes her friend Kathy (Donna Wilkes) with her to a get together of her family in some rather impressive mountain vacation home to help her through a bout of lovesickness. Lisa’s Dad, Orville Kruger (Guy Stockwell) is one of the great special effects makeup artists (though the work of his we see doesn’t really sell that greatness too well). He’s also in the habit of putting on some of his masks and entering the bedrooms of young friends of his daughter to really give them a fright, but that’s not going to be the sign of a coming killing spree by an effects artist you might expect.

In fact, Kruger, his wife Malinda (Alva Megowan), Lisa and their guest will fall victim to a home invasion by a gang of punks led– as far as that verb applies to insane ranting – by one Scratch (Brad Wilson). For reasons, Scratch and the Sniffs (bad punk band name not actually included in the movie) believe a famous effects guy like Orville will have loads of money, perhaps even gold bars, squirreled away in a hidden treasure room in his home. When neither gold nor treasure show up, the gang instead decides on a small rape and murder spree only Lisa will survive.

Even though there aren’t valuables hidden in the house, there is indeed a secret room there, a room in which dwells the huge, deformed and mentally not exactly healthy foster son of the family, Patrick (Robert Apica). Once the punks’ search leads to his room, he makes his displeasure with them murdering his family violently clear, turning the next twenty minutes of the movie into a bit of a slasher with the twist of the slasher killer being the (sort of, if you’re not into murder) good guy.

And that’s not the last change of sub-genres Joe Tornatore’s Grotesque will go through. After a tiny bit of American gothic horror, punksploitation, 70s style home invasion and slasher, there’s still enough time left for some hilariously weird tough cop time, and then a bit of vigilante business with Orville’s cosmetic surgeon brother Rod (Tab Hunter) – who came too late to get slaughtered or help anyone – which turns rather EC horror, after which there’s still a bit of time left for some of the goofiest, bizarre and tonally dubious fourth wall breaking imaginable. All of which goes to show that, if you simply don’t care for coherence and have never heard of the concept of a throughline, you can pack an astonishing amount of stuff into your movie.

Obviously, none of this is developed or sensibly connected in any way, shape or form, lending Grotesque a quality of randomness so pure, it’s difficult not to be surprised in which direction the movie’s going to go off in next. Hell, as it stands, you couldn’t even say who is supposed to be the film’s protagonist.

All of this, needless to say (but I’ll do it anyway), does not lend itself to a film with much of a dramatic, emotional impact. Everything is so disconnected, even the sleaziest exploitation bits can’t really hit anyone’s guts, so that this movie full of theoretically risible elements begins to feel weirdly friendly and companionable.

It is also wildly entertaining, not only thanks to its random march through all subgenres of horror that could be squeezed into it, but also because so much of the film is endearingly goofy, starting with Orville’s certainly not award-winning award-winning effects, going through the least plausible punk overacting by actors who clearly weren’t any such thing you’ll ever enjoy (we get equally unbelievable cops later on, too) and ending on a meta-horror bit so random and pointlessly, improbably bizarre, it’s impossible to find words for it that’ll do it justice.

And this, ladies, gentlemen and everybody elses, is why humanity is great (at least as a cosmic joke).

In short: Hell Night (1981)

It's the night of one of America's most mysterious fertility rites - pledge night in a college town. But before they are allowed to sacrifice dogs to the moon and run naked and bloody through the town's streets (that's what you do on pledge nights, right?), the four pledgees (that's the theological term) of Alpha Sigma Whatever have to spend a night in the local spook house, or rather spook mansion. Twelve years ago, a father murdered his disabled children - well, all but one of them, his wife and himself there. The surviving kid - as well as some of the dead bodies - of course went missing. Supposedly he still lives somewhere hidden away inside house.

The vigil of the student quartet - good girl and horrible actress Linda Blair, nice guy Peter Barton, loose girl Suki Goodwin and radical surfer dude Vincent Van Patten - is soon disturbed by frightening noises and screams. Clearly, not even college students trying to get into a sorority are dumb enough to believe the noises are ghosts, and not their future sorority brothers and sisters. Our heroes are right about it, too.

But, quite unexpectedly except for this being a horror movie, there's someone or something else creeping through the house, something of a rather murderous disposition and surprising physical resilience.

As regular readers know, I'm not the biggest fan of the slasher sub-genre in general, perhaps because I have seen too many films in the genre which can hardly be distinguished from each other. Sure, I like the really good examples of the genre (like the original Halloween and the original My Bloody Valentine), as well as the really weird ones and the accidentally atmospheric ones a lot, but the genre's middle-ground has never done much for me. Tom DeSimone's Hell Night is pretty close to what I think about as the sub-genre's middle ground, yet even my cynical, jaded disposition can't resist the film's simple but heart-warming charms.

Hell Night is a lot like I imagine a slasher made by William Castle to feel - made with a sense for a quick buck as well as an eye for atmosphere, and just oozing the good-naturedness and cynicism of a house of horrors at your favourite carnival.

There's something to be said for a slasher not actively hating its protagonists,too. Hell Night even seems to like its future victims of horrible deaths, or at least it looks at them with a sympathetic eye that clearly does not find much wrong with them wanting to have a bit of fun, or telling each other stories of their elf and witch sightings. Of course, they're getting killed off anyhow, for that's what the audience has paid to see.

So, even though the film has a solid body count, this is not one of those horror films delighted by its own mean-spiritedness, nor is it one out to make its audience feel like victims of a car crash. Hell House really just wants you to have a good time watching teens (or "teens") talk silly nonsense, walk through an impressive old dark house, and get killed in somewhat bloody and violent ways; it's going about this so sweetly that it's hard to disagree with its ambitions.

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