The unclassy – okay, trashy revenger Savage Streets (1984) starring Linda Blair and Linnea Quigley is headed back to DVD via Code Red. Back? You may remember BCI previously released it, with extras produced by Code Red. But CR have the whole film now which means a new print, and word has it there may be some new or different extras. Here’s a screen from that new print:
Many more can be found on Code Red’s blog.
Sledgehammer new VHS edition - courtesy blog.mondotees.com
UPDATE MAY 9: Mondo, the collectible art boutique arm of Alamo Drafthouse Cinema, is pleased to announce a partnership with Intervision Picture Corporation to release 1983’s SLEDGEHAMMER on VHS. SLEDGEHAMMER, the first shot-on-tape slasher movie for the home video market, will be the first video release of Mondo Video, a label created to release rare genre films in a collectible VHS format. The VHS release will coincide with the film’s first release on DVD and a Terror Tuesday screening on Tuesday, May 10, 2011 at Alamo Drafthouse in Austin, TX. Mondo Video’s SLEDGEHAMMER includes the original box art and copy from the 1983 VHS release and will be available for purchase only at MondoTees.com on Wednesday, May 11, 2011. The Intervision DVD will also be available for purchase on Tuesday, May 10, 2011 at Amazon.
Mondo creative director Justin Ishmael says, “I am downright crazy about VHS, so it gives me great pride that we get to make SLEDGEHAMMER the first release on our new Mondo Video label. There has been a major resurgence in VHS collecting the last few years after it was announced that the tapes would stop being made, so being fans ourselves, we jumped at the opportunity to actually resurrect the format and release some of our favorite movies on VHS. People thought they killed the video tape back in 2008, but like a phoenix, it is rising from the ashes! Never Forget!”
“Either by way of budget constraints, warped vision or both,” says Intervision marketing director Evan Husney, “SLEDGEHAMMER is a piece of a cinematic underbelly from a universe all its own. This is the new cult canon: Buried in obscurity and ripe for reintroduction, it delivers top-shelf bizarro derangement, gonzo action, transcendental fever dreams and beyond.”
Alamo Drafthouse’s Terror Tuesday programmer Zack Carlson, says “1940s scientists put years of study into creating the nuclear bomb, but it wasn’t until the first tests at Los Alamos that they realized its inhuman powers of absolute destruction. Four decades later, filmmaker David Prior similarly unveiled SLEDGEHAMMER, a shot-on-VHS masterstroke of anti-intellectual decimation. On that day, cinema quietly crumbled into dust. Ted Prior (star of Deadly Prey; brother of the director) leads a cast of self-loathing alcoholics who face off against a shape-shifting, dimension-crossing spectre with a penchant for blunt object trauma. By the end, brains, bowels and Budweiser will be smeared across every inch of the walls. A rewardingly lethal collision of ‘80s slasher video-vomit, suburban legend and unintentional surrealist art, Prior’s supernaturally disabled death opera is the most visionary migraine to ever pummel its way into your skull. If you survive it, you’ll never ever forget it.” Get tickets here.
SLEDGEHAMMER DVD Cover (click for hi-res)
Follow up to our older news item. Read on for final Sledgehammer DVD special features:
Severin Films announced an agreement with the estate of Larry Gold, Sr. to handle all future production and marketing for Intervision Picture Corporation. The arrangement commences with the 5/10 release of 1983’s SLEDGEHAMMER, notorious as the first shot-on-tape ‘slasher’ thriller for the then-exploding home video market. Gold, a pioneer of ‘70s film distribution and ‘80s genre VHS, died in March following a massive coronary at his home in Thailand. Severin’s Evan Husney will supervise all production and marketing for the label. Intervision product will continue to be distributed in the United States by CAV Distributing Corporation.
Intervision was reactivated in January 2011 with the DVD releases of recent Goya Award Winner Jess Franco’s 1973 rarity SINISTER EYES OF DR. ORLOFF and his acclaimed 2010 ‘audio-visual experience’ PAULA-PAULA. The 5/10 release of SLEDGEHAMMER marks the return of director David A. Prior’s bizarre video shocker, which was celebrated as part of Los Angeles’ Cinefamily ‘Homemade Horror’ series and will be screened on street-date at Austin’s Alamo Drafthouse. Future Intervision releases include the 1989 ‘Canuxploitaion’ oddity THINGS and 1993’s disturbing THE SECRET LIFE: JEFFREY DAHMER. Continue reading
Arrow Films have become Britain’s equivalent to Blue Underground, having released must-have special editions of many Dario Argento and Lucio Fulci movies, as well as such classics as Dawn of the Dead and Bay of Blood. Two of their latest titles announced are cult slashers that until now have received poor treatments on DVD and Blu-ray.
Slaughter High, produced in the UK in 1984 under the title April Fool’s Day, was previously released by Lionsgate with a poor selection of special features (an irrelevant trivia track), whilst Tobe Hooper’s underrated 1981 thriller The Funhouse, which was simultaneously adapted by acclaimed horror author Dean Koontz, received a vanilla release several years ago. Continue reading
So much has been said about the involvement (or non-involvement) of Tom Savini on Nightmare that often others with definitive special FX contributions to the film are overlooked. Code Red are looking to change that with this late breaking extra for their Nightmare 2-disc set.
“Special effects make-up artist Edward French, Oscar Nominee and Emmy Winner, quickly gave CODE RED a last minute interview regarding the New York gore scene in NIGHTMARE!
French told us about his involvement in the effects, including who made the decapitated head, and who supervised it and who was there. Cleve Hall did the Florida scenes, but now we’ll all finally know who did the bloody final scene!
French also gave us some other wonderful stories regarding RIOT ON 42nd STREET, BLOOD RAGE, BREEDERS and DEADTIME STORIES. The insightful interview will hopefully be edited on time and be featured on the dvd!”
French was also responsible for the gruesome special effects in Sleepaway Camp (1983).
It was nice to come back from a little Retro Slashers holiday to discover Code Red have finally brought their website into the 21st century. Maybe that’s not breaking news, but it’s the first I’ve seen of it in an updated, fully-functioning condition, at least. The new site has catalogue listings of their DVDs, future releases and a handy Out Of Print list for collectors.
The company is continuing their commitment to retro horror, one of the promising future releases being The Witchmaker (1969), but slasher fans are of course hanging out for July 5th’s release of Nightmare. And it turns out Rituals actually is available now. Seems things are moving smoothly.
Thanks to a fine series of articles right here on Retro Slashers, the notion of “proto-slashers” – the films that paved the way for the slasher movie boom – has become a familiar one. And, thanks to Dave Stewart’s reviews, hopefully, you’ll have come across a few early-period gems you might otherwise have missed. Now I’d like to take you on a trip through the movies that followed the slasher craze… Not via the boom-and-bust cycle of sequels and copycats we’re all familiar with but, rather, with a look at the way that slasher sensibilities seeped into several other filmic genres. In other words, how the humble slasher flick managed to get its bloody fingerprints all over the mainstream movies of the 1980s.
Now, this isn’t a new idea – in fact, Justin Kerswell sums it up neatly in his essential slasher guide Teenage Wasteland (p.161 if you have to make a dash to your coffee table) – but I’d like to focus specifically on the years 1978-1996, which any slasher fan will recognize as the period from Halloween to Scream, and particularly on the early-to-mid Eighties, when no movie was quite safe from the slasher influence.
In fact, for a few years following Halloween and Friday the 13th, a whole slew of well-budgeted, ostensibly mainstream thrillers (at least half of which were directed by Brian De Palma) took their gory throat-slicing and suchlike so seriously that we might as well call them slashers in their own right. You’re no doubt familiar with the likes of Dressed to Kill (1980), Blow Out (1981) and Body Double (1984), as well as The Shining (1980), Dead and Buried (1981) and Psycho II (1983). We could even go so far as to argue that the slasher mood had been brewing across related genres since the likes of 1978’s blockbuster Jaws 2, which is basically a toothy slasher flick, and the same year’s stab-happy police procedural, Blood Relatives, and stalking-heavy medical thriller, Coma.
What’s interesting is the way that some subsequent non-horror films took slasher themes to heart so vigorously that genre fans will likely find them as satisfying as straight-up slashers. I aim to list as many as I can think of in this article (and perhaps follow them up with some in-depth reviews later on) but please feel free to suggest any slasher “aftershock” movies I’ve missed – I’d love to hear the recommendations. Now let’s get stuck in!
The Thriller Mainstream
It’s easy to map the overlap between thriller and slasher, going right back to the giallo films of the 1970s, as well as Halloween (itself as much an exercise in suspense as horror) and When a Stranger Calls (1979), the curious melding of detective thriller and slasher that more-or-less defined the rules of the now-inescapable Scream-style opening. Equally obvious is the genre’s influence on mainstream thrillers of the mid-80s like Jagged Edge (1985), Fatal Attraction (1987) and Someone to Watch Over Me (1987), which pushed domestic violence to its blood-soaked, crowd-pleasing limits. An often overlooked but particularly satisfying example is the 1987 courtroom thriller (and Cher vehicle) Suspect, which turns at the climax into a genuinely hackle-raising chase that’s up there with any of the preceding Friday the 13ths. Similarly, the decade saw Farrah Fawcett playing cat-and-mouse with a rapist in Extremities (1986) and Mary Steenburgen trapped in a snowbound house with a psychopath in Dead of Winter (1987). Both films mix slasher thrills with quality performances, good casts and more. Finally, without slashers, would big-name thrillers like the Lauren Bacall-fronted The Fan (1981) have upped the gore and violence to such extremes? I think we owe the genre a big thank-you for that!
Erotic Thrills
The legacy of these violent mainstream thrillers – themselves often featuring generous doses of romance and psychology – has been that direct-to-video (and cable TV) mainstay, the erotic thriller. Reaching a heyday in the early Nineties with successful (or at least high-profile) cinema outings like Basic Instinct (1992), Sliver (1993) and Body of Evidence (1993), the genre essentially boils down to the exact same blueprint as the slasher: namely, nudity and murder. Of course, the emphasis is on the former here – after all, who wants to be presented with a realistic disembowelment when you’re sitting there with your hand down your pants? (Don’t answer that.) The Seduction set the mould back in 1982, with Morgan Fairchild and a lot of bubble bath, while the slasher influence even found its way into the popular, Private Lessons-type sex-comedy format in They’re Playing with Fire (1984). By the Nineties, increasingly graphic shagfests (usually starring Shannon Tweed) were big money despite the fact that most viewers only tuned in for, er, as long as necessary – meaning that such elements as plot didn’t so much take a back seat as find themselves clinging to the roof-rack, flapping shamefully in the wind. Still, slasher fans may get some enjoyment out of some of the more actually entertaining examples, such as Mirror Images (1992), Animal Instincts (1992) and Scorned/A Woman Scorned (1994). If not, check out Debbie Harry’s see-it-to-believe-it, blowtorch-wielding turn in the very slashery Intimate Stranger (1991)… but don’t say I didn’t warn you!
Slasher Action
Before delving deeper into various other sorts of thrillers, I want to try and convince you that the slasher boom affected a few other genres too: action, detective, and even war… Yes, war! Don’t believe me? Try on 1987’s Full Metal Jacket for size, and notice how the cycle of humiliation and abuse turns into violence, bloodshed, and friends being picked off one-by-one. OK, so military training is hardly the “pranks gone wrong” of a college campus, but the overarching theme and structure is largely the same. Also watch 1981’s Southern Comfort and tell me it’s not a backwoods slasher. And, while we’re enjoying a few action movies, add Silent Rage (1982) to the pile, in which Chuck Norris confronts an indestructible boogeyman killer, and Cobra (1986), wherein Sylvester Stallone squares off against a whole army of psychopaths. They’re slasher movies, both, no matter what they call themselves.
Cops and Killers
We’re starting to touch now on the serial killer genre that has its roots in the slasher (think back to When a Stranger Calls) and takes us all the way through to the Oscar-winning glory of The Silence of the Lambs (1991), the arguably even better but less lauded Se7en (1995), and, with their focus on the at-home activities of demented maniacs, the torture-porn-flavoured outings of the current century. 1983’s 10 to Midnight makes a strong starting-point, boasting a title that makes no sense but alternating kill scenes straight out of a slasher movie with scenes of Charles Bronson investigating said kills. Cops also face slasher-like scenarios in one of Clint Eastwood’s edgiest films, Tightrope (1984), as well as in Too Scared to Scream (1985), The Mean Season (1985) and Deadly Pursuit/Shoot to Kill (1988), which features an extended backwoods-slasher sequence and starred none other than Sidney Poitier. How’s that for respectable? I’d say things reached a head on this front, however, in Maniac Cop (1988), a full-on, gore-filled and rather brilliant action-horror hybrid helmed by William Lustig, the man behind 1980’s classic Maniac. (Lustig also made another cop/horror movie a year later in Relentless – it’s more low-key, but slasher through-and-through.)
The Cuckoo in the Nest
Slasher movies, it is said, like to punish their victims for having too much sex. In the Nineties, however, the punishment was for having too much money – but the punishment was nevertheless the same, and generally involved being chased around by a psychopath and possibly dying in gruesome fashion. So it was goodbye self-obsessed 80s, hello self-aware 90s, when the “yuppies in peril” cycle really took off and guilty suburbanites were left to defend their homes and yachts from psychopathic intruders in Dead Calm (1989), Pacific Heights (1990), Cape Fear (1991), The Hand That Rocks the Cradle (1992), The Temp (1993), Mother’s Boys (1994) and, oh… you get the picture. I’ve found one a year there for six straight years in a row and still had time to eat a bagel. I’m not saying these films are slashers, but they usually feature violent and protracted climaxes of the sort you don’t find on the other side of the 80s slasher boom. Some, like The Temp and The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, are also based around showpiece deaths, while the slash-informed differences between 1962’s Cape Fear and its 1991 remake are only too clear.
So What Else?
Well, since you asked, I’ve come up with a handful of other films that take their cue from the slasher genre but are less easy to place in tidy boxes like those above. Returning to the Eighties, there’s Paul Verhoeven’s The Fourth Man (1983), a manic, religious-themed forerunner of Basic Instinct, and Michael Winner’s surprisingly suspenseful suburban thriller Scream for Help (1984). I also detect a hint of slash in the spy/romance Eye of the Needle (1981), starring Kate Nelligan, not to mention the similarly espionage-themed Half Moon Street (1986), which also bares Sigourney Weaver’s breasts. Move into the Nineties and all bets are off. Consider Brian De Palma’s insane later psycho-thriller Raising Cain (1992): it’s not quite like his Eighties efforts, yet not quite like anything else, either, except perhaps the work of Dario Argento (and, believe me, you don’t want to get me started on that subgenre or we’ll be here all night). All I’ll add is that I know a number of people who call it one of the scariest movies they’ve ever seen. There’s also Misery (1990), the underrated A Kiss Before Dying (1991), death by giant scissors in Dead Again (1991) and the influential Danish Nightwatch (1994).
By the time Scream arrived in 1996, the public was so familiar with the tropes and tricks of the slasher movie that Dimension Films didn’t even need to market it as such, keeping their options open by calling it a glossy psychological thriller-cum-teen horror movie. No one was fooled, however, and indeed no one was cheated – after years of skulking around the fringes of the mainstream with a mask over its face, the slasher flick had finally gone legit.
If there has ever been a franchise that failed to live up to its potential then it is The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Although the 1974 original is considered a seminal classic, worthy of being placed alongside Psycho and Night of the Living Dead as important works of art, the subsequent series has been inconsistent at best. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2, released over a decade later, replaced the sadistic tension of the original with over-the-top gore (courtesy of Tom Savini) and a camp tone, a decision that strongly divided fans.
But neither Leatherface: Texas Chainsaw Massacre III or The Return of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre managed to keep the cycle moving and the franchise eventually withered and died. Following Platinum Dunes’ sleazy and ultra-violent remake in 2003, producers attempted to restart the series with a disappointing prequel The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning, which once again brought everything to a standstill.
Two days ago it was revealed that John Luessenhop (Takers) was set to direct a new sequel to the remake, this time without the assistance of Platinum Dunes. Now Bloody Disgusting have reported that a script has been submitted to the producers and it is now being reworked by another writer; “Debra Sullivan, Adam Marcus and Stephen Susco have turned in drafts the third Chainsaw flick that supposedly picks up immediately where Tobe Hooper’s original left off before flashing forward 35 years. An update to the story is that Kirsten Elms (writer of Gold Circle and director F. Gary Gray’s Hair of the Dog) was hired to re-tool the script under the guidance Luessenhop.”
What are your thoughts on this? Is this a franchise worth saving or has this concept gone as far as it can go?
The Legend: The woods in Upstate New York belong to Cropsey, a madman with a passion for butchering young campers. Why Cropsey kills is unclear. Some say he was a cruel handyman disfigured by campers who fought back during one of Cropsey’s alcohol fueled rages. Others say Cropsey was a judge who lived with his family near a summer camp. When a group of campers set fire to the Cropsey house it cost the judge his family, his face, and his sanity. Or maybe Cropsey kills campers because his farmland was seized by the government and turned into camps for underprivileged city kids. The woods in Upstate New York belong to Cropsey and you better stay out if you want to live.
The Films: The Burning, Madman, Sleepaway Camp II, Sleepaway Camp III.
Folklorists blame the rise of the slasher films in the late 1970s, early 1980s as the catalyst for spreading certain urban legends across the globe. The Cropsey legend is a good example of a local urban legend gaining national prominence because of his status as a slasher icon. There are variations on the Cropsey legend in New York but slasher fans know “Cropsy” as the crispy handyman in The Burning, the first film written and produced by the Weinstein brothers. Cropsy stays true to the legend in The Burning by targeting the campers instead of the counselors, something that separates Cropsy from killers like Jason or Mrs. Voorhees.
Ironically, another film inspired by the Cropsey legend started production shortly after the Weinsteins began filming The Burning. Joe Giannone heard the Cropsey legend at summer camp and wrote The Legend Lives based on that story. During casting, Giannone and producer Gary Sales learned the Weinsteins were filming the exact same story in another part of New York. Giannone and Sales shut down production when they read the script for The Burning and completely rewrote The Legend Lives. Everything related to the legend of Cropsey was gutted and replaced with a crazy farmer named Marz. Today Madman Marz is a slasher icon in his own right thanks to the cult status of Madman.
Sleepaway Camp II transforms Angela from a confused teen into a Cropsey-like killer. The first scene in the film turns Angela into an urban legend told around campfires at summer camps. Like Cropsey, Angela has suffered a type of mutilation but her scars are harder to see. Angela also directs most of her anger at the campers. She kills the counselors when they get in the way but her main target is the campers. Sleepaway Camp III continues Angela’s journey into folklore boogeyman. Once again, Angela takes out the bad campers while pursuing the cop who arrested her in the first film.
By Film, By VHS, By laserdisc, Bye Bye! Quick, release The Mutilator on DVD before we run out of cheesy puns. Okay, so the following which was posted on Code Red’s blog is more of a clarification than updating, but we’re betting much of it will be news to readers who haven’t been following the multi-year non-opus of giving The Mutilator a worthy DVD release.
There have been some 2nd hand statements and slanderous lies posted on few message boards regarding CODE RED and the motion picture THE MUTILATOR. Here is the truth once again to set the records straight.
(1) CODE RED has a valid contract with Buddy Cooper on the film.
(2) Mr. Cooper told us that he had the negative and prints in New York, but later we realized that the place was gone. Buddy used his assistant to search for it, only to come up empty handed.
(3) Buddy did find a 3/4 inch tape (I recall the R cut), but this is unusable for today’s standards for a DVD release. 3/4 will look worse than your old VHS Vestron Tape and most likely will not play since it has had a 15 year lifespan.
(4) A youtube video poped up with Buddy showing a storage shack with some 35mm cans in the background. I talked to Buddy and he told me it was empty. He did find some trims and some trailers which we sent to a Los Angeles lab (the one Something Weird used). The 35mm trailer was damaged due to poor storage/weather conditions after 25 years. If there had been a 35mm print inside, it would most likely also be damaged/beyond repair.
(5) Rumor circled around that Movielab New York had the negatives. Cliff MacMillan of BCI personally asked Mike Vraney of Something Weird and he didn’t have it. It was not at Movielab. Since then, many print collectors and film storage people were contacted. Nothing.
We can’t understand why so many people spew slanderous lies about us regarding this film. We have mentioned these facts countless times, but it seems we might have to put this bulletin out once a year. If Buddy has a 35mm usable print, he never told us or delivered it to us. This is the 2011 bulletin. Come back next year to probably see the same bulletin all over again. This is what we have on the table, nothing else.
I posted this story back in November of 2009. The news was that Rituals was set to hit DVD players from Code Red in November/December of that year. Rue Morgue mag even gave the anticipated release a cover and accompanying piece. Rituals, though, didn’t happen. Now it looks as though this backwoods Canadian proto-slasher is going to be released as early as next week! It’s available for pre-order at various sites online (though not always the most obvious ones), and people are reportedly picking it up in some retail outlets. Code Red has just listed it in its Coming Soon section with an April 19 release date, though people have received notifications that their pre-orders have already shipped. I know I’ve pre-ordered my copy! Regardless, it looks good for this cult favourite that will hopefully reach a wider audience via Code Red. Be on the lookout!
