#211: Attack of the Beast Creatures (Michael Stanley, 1985)

Made in 1983, this extremely low budget Connecticut-filmed micro-indie doesn't have a whole lot going for it, besides its fantastically redundant title, but it powers through all its limitations and weaknesses with energy and pizzazz. This is not a good movie, or even a barely competent one, but I admire its plucky charm and just as plucky lack of charm. Somehow, these people made this movie and it exists, and that is something.

Set in 1920 for no real discernible reason other than to put some of the men in tuxedos and the women in old-fashioned evening gowns and flapper-wear, Attack of the Beast Creatures begins with a group of survivors on a lifeboat pulling some other survivors out of the water and trying and failing to rescue a few others. The surviving motley crew are American passengers and employees of a ship sailing for England. The ship sank somewhere in the North Atlantic, and our survivors are adrift on the ocean looking for any sign of help. They eventually make their way to a strange island where the plan is to take shelter for the night and find some food before making signal fires in the morning.

The freaky island has other plans. Despite its delicious berries and refreshing streams with fresh fish, the island also contains deceptively tranquil pools of water that are actually flesh-melting acid, as one poor sucker finds out to his face-melting chagrin. The acid pools are merely the preamble to the island's premier attraction: a population of tiny, flesh-eating terrors strongly resembling bright-red versions of the killer Zuni doll that tormented Karen Black in Trilogy of Terror. These little guys have strength in numbers, and love chomping down on our collection of shipwreck survivors.

And that's pretty much it. The rest of the movie is a series of attacks on the humans by the tiny doll monsters as our ever-decreasing crew attempts to make it back to their boat and get the eff out of Dodge.

Director Stanley and writer Robert A. Hutton make sure each character gets exactly one character trait, and they squabble, help each other, and yell and scream a lot as they fend off attack after attack by our Zuni-esque beast creatures. The acting is pretty bad across the board, though this is the only movie most of our cast and crew has ever made, so that's pretty understandable. The sound and lighting are also fairly poor, but our filmmakers give it all they've got, adding spooky electronic music to underscore the action and quick cutting and camera movements, POV shots, and goofy sounds to give the otherwise fairly static beast creatures a sense of menace and movement. I also enjoyed their glowing eyes in the dark while one of our characters stood watch at the campfire.

I don't know the origins of this film, but judging by the number of Huttons in the credits, I assume this was a largely family-financed and produced labor of love that accidentally stumbled into limited distribution. The 1980s VHS release is long out of print, and no official DVD exists. Don't hold your breath for a Criterion release. The best way to see Attack of the Beast Creatures now is YouTube. As of this writing two separate accounts have uploaded the whole thing. It's not a good movie, but it is a good time, and I couldn't help but smile through most of it. 

#210: April Fool's Day (Fred Walton, 1986)

April Fool's Day arrived in the late middle of the teenage slasher movie boom, a time when movies about horny teens getting picked off one by one seemed to appear in theaters twice weekly. It follows the slasher subgenre fairly closely but uses a twist ending to parody and critique slasher movies, though this twist is not as clever as the director and screenwriter think it is. Still, April Fool's Day is a fairly agreeable entertainment and a nifty little 1980s time capsule that may also inspire class hatred if you come from a working-class background.

April Fool's Day begins by swapping the usual gang of horny teenagers with a gang of horny young adults from privileged backgrounds. This ragtag but wealthy group are all Vassar classmates of Muffy St. John, and they're waiting to be ferried over to her family's summer home, a sprawling island estate, for an April Fool's Day weekend getaway. Muffy's already there. The gang includes perpetually horny, perpetually video camera-wielding, spiky-haired bad boy Chaz Vyshinski, attractive down-to-earth couple Kit and Rob (though Rob is feeling angst about not getting into medical school), studious and shy bookworm with a secret Nan, collar-flipping practical joke-playing semi-bad boy Arch, mysterious angst-filled poor little rich boy Skip (Muffy's cousin), perpetually horny sexpot Nikki, and cornpone aw shucks Southern boy striving for the big time Harvey. After Harvey dispenses some Southern-fried Dixie wisdom, Chaz lowers his shades and says, "YOU know Muffy St. John?" Ha ha ha, what a group. Interestingly, the actor playing the Southern guy is actually from Tennessee, but he speaks in the fake Hollywood version of a Southern accent. That is how bad Hollywood misunderstands the Southern accent. They make an actual Southerner speak in a fake Southern accent.

Things start getting weird the second our gang of privileged dicks gets on the ferry. After some practical jokery involving a knife and fake blood sets the tone, a ferry boat employee gets part of his face scraped off by the boat. He's rushed to the mainland hospital and the japes and jokes and pranks stop for a somber, but very brief, few minutes. Once the gang reaches the island, the jokes start flying again. Muffy has rigged the house with cartoon-style pranks (a painting that watches you, chairs that flip you out of your seat, a sink that shoots water in your face, doorknobs that fall off, lights that won't turn off, etc.). What a bunch of cut-ups.

The jokes stop flying again when one of the gang disappears and then turns up dead. Soon, our rich, horny Ivy League protagonists start getting the murder treatment, one by one. Who is killing them? How will they get help when they're stuck on an island reachable only by boat? Why is Muffy acting so strange? Who will get laid? How do they stop this crazy sink from spraying water in their faces? The questions are many.

(This paragraph contains SPOILERS. Oh shiiiiiitttttt! Skip to the next paragraph if you don't want the ending spoiled.) Kit and Rob are the last two left. They find out that Muffy has been murdered by her evil twin sister Buffy and are about to get killed by Buffy when the whole gang shows up. They're not dead after all. The whole thing has been an elaborate prank orchestrated by Muffy (there is no Buffy) so she can prove to her rich father that she can turn the island estate into a money-making combination haunted house/dinner theater holiday getaway and thereby inherit the place when she turns 21. Skip is her brother, not her cousin, and the ferry boat guy who lost part of his face is actually a Hollywood special effects dude who is friends with the family. Ha ha ha. What a card. Kit and Rob are pissed, but the champagne is wheeled out and all is forgiven. The rich dicks celebrate and pour champagne everywhere, celebrating their smug privilege. Entertaining, but gross. I remember seeing this as a kid and being pissed about the whole thing being a prank. Many horror fans felt the same way. (Also, you have to ignore the 9,000 plot holes in any movie where the whole thing was a prank/ruse/dream the entire time.) This time, I enjoyed that aspect of it but was more pissed at the smug rich kid angle and what shitty friends these people are. (End of SPOILERS.)

April Fool's Day was directed by Fred Walton, the guy who made When a Stranger Calls ("the call is coming from inside the house!!!!!!") and written by Danilo Bach, the guy who wrote all the Beverly Hills Cop movies. Walton is a pro, and the movie looks pretty good for its budget, though it's hardly a visually stunning piece. Speaking of the 1980s time capsule element, the cast represents a pretty big chunk of '80s iconography. Muffy is played by Deborah Foreman, star of Valley Girl. Thomas F. Wilson, best known as Biff in the Back to the Future movies, plays Arch. Amy Steel, who plays Kit, was the lone survivor of Friday the 13th Part 2, and her boyfriend Rob was played by Summer School's Ken Olandt. Clayton Rohner (Chaz) and Deborah Goodrich (Nikki) starred in Just One of the Guys. Nearly everyone in the cast appeared in an episode of The A-Team. Griffin O'Neal (Skip) is best known as the son of Ryan O'Neal and the driver in the drunken boating accident that killed Francis Ford Coppola's oldest son. The '80s, eh? Where does the time go?

I watched this movie yesterday, the day the Supreme Court legalized gay marriage nationwide. For all my cynicism and fear about the way the world is going, sometimes we really do make progress as a country and as human beings, and yesterday was one of those great days for civil rights and equality. Because of yesterday's events, the casual homophobia in this movie was really amplified for me. It's nothing too egregious, but the characters of Arch, Chaz, and Skip find it hilarious to pretend to be gay, and the audience is expected to find this funny, too. There was a lot of casual homophobia in popular '80s American movies (Michael J. Fox calls someone a fag in Teen Wolf, for example), and it's nice to see that play out as antiquated, misguided, ignorant, and old-fashioned in a movie that wasn't made that long ago. Sometimes, things do move in the right direction.

I guess what I'm saying is, April Fool's Day is not a masterpiece.