Definitely First Blood

October is upon us and we’re kicking off our annual Halloween episodes with 1992 slasher HAPPY HELL NIGHT!!! This disjointed Canadian/Yugoslavian venture is directed by Brian Owens, who also wrote along with Ron Peterson and Michael Fitzpatrick and really comes across like they each wrote 25 pages separate from each other. The acting is good from our group of college kids played by Laura Carney, Frank John Hughes, the very foxy Elvis Restaino, Nick Gregory, Tim Clark and a young Jorja Fox as an unnamed sorority girl. The villain Zachary Malius played by Charles Cragin was effective enough and it also features Darren McGavin and Sam Rockwell as Henry Collins, a frat boy who made a deal with a demon 25 years earlier. Look, this isn’t a great film… you can see when reshoots happened, they try and pass off different sets as the same and the story doesn’t make any sense as it goes on. It looks fantastic though! NO FUCKING!

Corey Haim! Slater! Tarantulas! Night Smoke! Blondes! This week we’re talking about the extremely poorly crafted slasher with a soft spot in Christopher’s heart FEVER LAKE!!! Six pals venture off for a weekend at Corey Haim’s abandoned familial house where people are constantly being reincarnated and killed… maybe. The mythos is sloppy and inconsistent. Also, other people randomly die there too? Anyway, this story probably should have been about Lila.

Casual racism, probable tetanus, motorcycles and TOTALLY American locales! This week we’re talking Ruggero Deodato’s mehhhh Italian slasher Body Count! Two groups of young folks end up at a campground in “Colorado” where some murders happened 15 years earlier because of a Shaman’s ghost, and now they’re being killed but not by the ghost… it’s kind of a Scooby Doo situation. It looks nice and Cynthia Thompson as Cissy really steals the show and it’s always nice to see David Hess, but there is a fair amount of blatant racism in this one that really punches you in the gut out of nowhere. Overall, not great!

We’re back and this week we’re talking Wallace Potts’ 1989 slasher PSYCHO COP! Six college students (Palmer Lee Todd, Jeff Qualle, Linda West, Cindy Guyer, Dan Campbell & Greg Joujon-Roche) rent a house and are killed one-by-one by a “satanic” police officer(Robert R Shafer of The Office). There’s lots of random walking around, a very funny tool collection, zingers and A LOT of characters talking to themselves. It’s quirky and kinda fun for novelty’s sake but it gets extremely repetitive and comes off as super Christian, almost like a Hell House… if you know what I mean!

We couldn’t record this week but, Christopher wanted to check-in and give some quick thoughts on a few movies he’s seen recently! We should be back next week.  Stay safe out there!

The Rental(not the Dave Franco one.): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JT8Kkb7DG2w

Cranial bisections, outhouse death and septic sucking! This week we’re talking Dave Payne’s REEKER! Five people sharing a ride, find themselves stranded at a hotel/diner/gas station where they’re hunted by a cloaked, stinky figure and it features an extremely popular trope from the mid 00’s - early’10s. Reeker stars Tina Illman, Devon Gummersall, Arielle Kebbel, Scott Whyte, Derek Richardson, Eric Mabius and genre icon Michael Ironside. It looks nice and is pretty entertaining but we were at odds with each other on this one. Mitch didn’t care for it! At least you can whack off!

WARNING: SPOILERS!!! In this instalment of DFB Shorts we’re talking about Natalie Erika James’ RELIC!!! Starring Robyn Nevin, Bella Heathcote and Emily Mortimer, Relic tells the story of three generations of women as they grapple with the deteriorating mental state of the matriarch. It’s an extremely atmospheric and beautiful film with great performances and some genuinely creepy parts. We highly recommend it!

This heatwave is killing us, so we’re cooling off with ICE CREAM MAN!!! This tepid 90’s slasher(?) is written by David Dobkin and Sven Davison and directed by Paul Norman(Norman Apstein). It stars the great Clint Howard as Gregory the Ice Cream Man as he goes after a group of local kids who know he’s up to no good played by Anndi McAfee, Justin Isfeld, JoJo Adams and Mikey Lebeau. It also has a lot of familiar faces as side characters like Olivia Hussey, David Naughton, Jan Michael Vincent and David Warner. While there are parts we enjoyed, for the most part it wasn’t serious enough to be taken seriously and it wasn’t zany enough to be zany. It gets stuck in this weird limbo of being poorly edited, loosely strung together and inconsistent with the world they’ve built. Who’s the Pied Piper now, ice cream dick!?

Decapitations, dismemberment, nipple play and demons, this week we’re talking about DEMON KNIGHT!!! Directed by Ernest Dickerson, written by Ethan Reiff, Cyrus Voris and Mark Bishop and starring Jada Pinkett Smith, Billy Zane, William Sadler & CCH Pounder; Demon Knight tells the story of Brayker as he tries to protect the residents of a New Mexico hotel from the demonic Collector and also figure out which of them is destined to be the next chosen one in the battle against evil! Demon Knight is a lot of fun with great performances from everybody involved and some truly amazing practical effects! Assholes don’t have friends!

WARNING: SPOILERS!!! This week we’re reviewing short film SUICIDE BY SUNLIGHT! Directed by Nikyatu Jusu and starring Natalie Paul, Motell Foster, Madison Spicer, Juniah Williams-West, Destin Khari & Alexis Nichole Smith, Suicide By Sunlight is an extremely well-crafted short intended as a proof-of-concept for a series that THEY NEED TO MAKE IMMEDIATELY.