#40: Hell Night (Tom DeSimone, 1981)

Before I write anything about Hell Night, I want to begin with a digression about the director, Tom DeSimone. His career path might be one of the strangest in film history. He started out as an editor of educational films and children's movies. He then directed a low-budget action movie before embarking on a career as a gay porn director under the name Lancer Brooks. Eventually, he started making drive-in exploitation films, but unlike other directors who made the move from porno to more "legitimate" filmmaking, he continued to direct gay porn. DeSimone's accomplishments in the adult film world include directing the first-ever 3-D gay porno, entitled Heavy Equipment, as well as the horror/porn gay vampire movie Sons of Satan. Other titles, for your enjoyment: Swap Meat, Erotikus, Hot Truckin', Wet Shorts, and Bi-Coastal. For the non-porn side of his career, DeSimone ran the exploitation gamut from horror to women-in-chains to women-in-prison to bad girls to Chatterbox, the story of a girl with a talking vagina. He also found the time to make a few documentaries. Following the death of the drive-in and porn theaters, DeSimone started directing mainstream television, with the occasional straight-to-video porn title. He hasn't directed anything since 2002.
On to Hell Night. The film begins with the mother of all fraternity parties. The entire street is full of drunken revelry, including some guy blowing into a tuba while sitting on top of a moving vehicle. Inside the frat house, shit is even crazier. Everyone is dressed in costume, the beer steins are overflowing, kegs are thrown through the front window, and sorority girls are propositioned. Finally, frat president Kevin Brophy takes the party to Garth Manor, a spooky old mansion in which a father murdered his entire family and committed suicide twelve years ago tonight. Brophy then instructs the four new fraternity and sorority pledges that they must spend the night in Garth Manor because it's, you know, Hell Night and all. The frat boys are played by Donny Osmond lookalike Peter Barton and Vincent Van Patten, son of Dick Van Patten and current professional poker commentator. The sorority girls are played by Linda Blair and Suki Goodwin. Barton and Blair are goodie-two-shoes who aren't that enthused about joining the Greek system. Barton's joining because of family pressure and Blair joins because she gets a free car and clothes in exchange for doing everyone's English homework. Van Patten is a surfer dude and all-around party guy who gives an extended monologue about surfing that's pretty much a thinly veiled description of gay sex. Viewers unaware of DeSimone's filmography might be scratching their heads at that one, especially since Van Patten is about to have sex with bad girl Goodwin. We know she's the bad girl because she loves casual sex and offers her fellow pledges Quailudes and whiskey. We know the movie is from 1981 because she offers her fellow pledges Quailudes.
The four pledges settle in for the night at Garth Manor. Blair and Barton bond, while Van Patten and Goodwin drink, screw, and take Quailudes. Shortly thereafter, Brophy and some Greek pals sneak back to Garth Manor and attempt to scare the new pledges. They've rigged all kinds of haunted-house crap to the Manor and have a good time pulling frat-dick pranks, until they discover that SOMETHING ELSE IS IN THE HOUSE!! Could it be one of the Garth clan, whose body was never found? Could he be hiding in the underground catacombs beneath the Manor, waiting for his chance to murder sexy, trespassing, young adults? Why didn't he kill anybody during the previous eleven years of Hell Night initiation rituals? The first two questions get answered, the last one doesn't.
Needless to say, Hell Night is not a unique film. It follows the template of late 1970s/early 1980s teen sex comedies and slasher flicks, respectively, in the first half hour and final two-thirds. The fact that Irwin Yablans produced this film in between producing Halloween and Halloween II pretty much says it all. However, the film is skillfully and professionally made, the locations look great, the cast does a good job humanizing the characters -- especially Linda Blair, the atmosphere is just right, there are some clever shock sequences, and, most importantly, it's fun. Really fun. So fun that I'm going to join a fraternity tomorrow and throw a keg through the window.

#39: Hardware (Richard Stanley, 1990)

Remember what the future looked like in 1990? Yep. That's right. Monochromatic post-apocalyptic urban wastelands, killer robots, industrial rock soundtracks, wise-cracking British sidekicks, midgets buying and selling scrap metal, crazy new street drugs, surprisingly outdated yet futuristic computer technology, lawlessness, sinister government plots to control overpopulation. That's music video director Richard Stanley's feature debut, Hardware, in a robo-nutshell. Basically a cross between Steel Magnolias and Caddyshack (I mean, Mad Max and The Road Warrior, Blade Runner, and Total Recall), Stanley's film opens with goth band Fields of the Nephilim's Carl McCoy wearing some very sinister clothing and walking through a monochromatic desert littered with scrap metal. He finds a robot head and claw buried in the sand and takes it into the urban wasteland to sell to horrible actor Dylan McDermott and the previously mentioned little person. Turns out, McCoy is a "zone tripper" (He was a zone tripper, one way ticket, yeah/It took me so long to find out, and I found out), which means he's a mercenary who wanders the post-2Pacalypse looking for shit he can sell. McDermott is back in town after a long time away doing something I didn't care enough about to pay attention to, and he hooks up with his wisecracking British buddy, Shades (because he never takes off his sunglasses, hyuk hyuk). They head over to the heavily fortified pad of McDermott's girlfriend, Jill (Stacey Travis). She's a sculptress of scrap metal installations who has never left her apartment. After Shades realizes his third-wheelitude, he takes off so the reunited couple can get it on, late-night Cinemax style. I need to mention here that McDermott's character has a robotic hand. When they started their sex romp in the shower, I said, "I hope he squeezes her ass with his robotic hand." Then he actually did it! Jill makes an installation with the robot, unaware that the robot can reassemble itself and power itself up by touching any power source. Did I mention it's a killer robot? Well, it is. And it's now ready to do some more killing. The other major character is a disgusting, slobby pervert who installed security cameras in the apartment complex and spies on Jill when her naughty bits are exposed. Will he get his comeuppance? The pervert is played by the hilariously named William Hootkins, who also acted in the other killer robot movie on our Fangoria list, Death Machine.
I have a very high tolerance for this kind of thing, but I can't recommend this to anyone who doesn't. Stanley clearly believes he's a major artist, and the pretension in this movie is so thick you could cut it with a slim volume of Foucault essays. He's a terrible writer, and the characters are wooden. However, the film looks great, and would probably look even better if it wasn't available only on VHS. The killer robot looks pretty sweet, especially after Jill paints an American flag pattern on its head (though this is probably another stab at pretentious symbolism: The robot is us! or The robot is U.S. imperialism!) Stanley's rock-video origins are apparent in the casting of McCoy, Motorhead's Lemmy as a cab driver, the voice of Iggy Pop as radio DJ Angry Bob (who brags about his "industrial dick"), and a soundtrack that features Iggy, Motorhead, Public Image Ltd., and Ministry's "Stigmata." The Ministry track is played over a scene showing GWAR on TV. Glad to see that GWAR survived the apocalypse. Director Stanley later went on to make the serial killer film Dust Devil and worked on the terrible 1996 remake of The Island of Dr. Moreau before being fired by Val Kilmer. He later snuck onto the set in costume as an extra and forced Kilmer to apologize. He hasn't directed anything since. Fangoria called Hardware "the best sci-fi/horror film since Alien." That's crazy talk.
I realized I wrote a post on Film-Watching Robot last night chastising people for voluntarily going to see the new Indiana Jones film even though they had low expectations, but I gladly, happily wasted ninety minutes of my life watching this entertaining piece of shit. Yes, I am a hypocrite. I love you all!