DEVIATION (1971) - the deviates tend to deviate

Certain professions in horror films raise immediate red flags. Say a group of lost teenagers happen upon a creepy house looking for directions. The owner invites them in, and the fat party stoner asks him “so, what do you do for a living?”. The owner replies, “well, as a matter of fact, I collect chainsaws. Would you kids like to see my vast collection down in the basement?”. Most of the audience (that is, anyone who hasn’t huffed vast quantities of paint fumes) immediately recognizes that no one would pay someone to collect chainsaws, and they attempt to provide the characters with helpful advice by yelling at the screen “GET THE FUCK OUTTA THE HOUSE YOU MORONS!!!”.

Thankfully, the teens ignore this advice and carry on exploring. After all, if they just immediately left the house, got directions from a friendly gas station attendant (I know there’s no such thing as a friendly gas station attendant, but bear with me; this is the world of make believe), the movie would frankly suck balls.

Taxidermy is a horror movie profession that doesn’t raise the red flags that it should, perhaps because it isn’t used very often. When Marion Crane eats that sandwich with Norman Bates in the parlor, she seems to find the stuffed animals leering at her to be nerdy and weird, but not seriously threatening. I’d like to think original audience members felt something similar, without the benefit of hindsight. Either way, the reclusive Norman Bates (the relatively sane side of his personality) probably uses taxidermy as a harmless hobby to try and deal with death and to pass the time, while his other half, mother, actually runs around killing people. After all, Norman would never hurt a fly, but is exactly the kind of guy that would have some weirdo hobby.

The “villains” of Deviation are brother and sister Julian and Rebecca. Julian is a taxidermist like Norman Bates, without the overtly evil double personality. Instead, his evilness is of the passive aggressive sort, a disturbed recluse interested in death, while his sister is sexually repressed to the point that she can be driven to violence when her psychosis is properly "agitated". They are the tenants of a creepy old house but, in defiance of obvious genre convention, they are tragic villains, unaware of their own hidden evil. The real villain, it would seem, is sexual repression itself.


The story begins with the old hoary cliché of a couple (a boring married man and his young hot stuff mistress) encountering some car trouble on a dark lonely road, forced to take refuge in a creepy old house. What is the source of the car trouble, you may ask? Well, according to the driver, he collided with “a young man in a white poncho”. Let’s not beat around the bush. We're talking hippie roadkill, folks.

Hippie crimp action circa 1971? Ahead of it's time, I dare say.

Well, why are there incognito hippies running about the woods? Well, it turns out that brother and sister, in their sexual repression, have sanctioned secret hippie orgies, complete with bongos and weed and awesome writhing hippie chicks (I could only wish I was that repressed, but hey). The man driving the car (whatever his name was) ends up searching the house and coming upon one of these orgies. Instead of being turned away at the door, like I probably would’ve been, he’s invited in, and even forced to have sex with a hot hippie chick. To think, he only sought refuge in the house, hoping for a call to a mechanic and maybe a bed for the night, and he ends up in something akin to backstage after a Zeppelin concert. Granted, he ends up murdered as part of the brother/sister/local hippie weirdo dynamic, but, all told, it was a glorious night out.


The mistress wakes up the next morning, none too concerned that her “lover” has disappeared. After all, he was merely a well-to-do schlub, and perhaps penniless excitement would be more fitting. However, the resident bed ridden nutter aunt tells her “go I tell you! They’ll kill you!”. She ignores these pleas and instead hits up some reefer with Julian and his orgy buddies. After all, if your main squeeze mysteriously vanishes, and a creepy old lady tells you that you’re gonna die, you’ll probably wanna blow off some steam.

What happens in the second half comes as a result of little tragedies built on sexual repression, perhaps akin to Polanski’s Knife on the Water. This might appear to be yet another entry into the “hippies are assholes genre” among the likes of I Drink Your Blood, Helter Skelter, The Devil’s Daughter (I swear I’ll get to reviewing that one), and of course, the “Passion of Joan of Arc” of the “hippies are assholes” genre, Gimme Shelter. However, what we have are two "villains", while vaguely associated with the “free love” ideal, are really festering islands onto themselves, isolated from humanity despite their monetary ability to attract hangers on. After all, if happiness is a warm gun, perhaps it’s really the warmth your attracted to…that is, any warmth you can get your hands on.

DEADLY MANOR (1990) - when a "spam in a cabin" plot takes place in a creepy house in the woods, things get extra spammy

Here's the entire movie. Remind me again why I bothered to buy an import DVD of this some time ago.

So sad. A young naked couple, struck down in their prime of their lives. Apparently, they were fucking on a motorcycle going 60 miles an hour, and somehow, this tragically led to their demise.

Open and shut case? Well, a mysterious black car drives away from the scene, so maybe it was all a devious conspiracy. A “third party”, hiding on a knoll (whatever the fuck that is) may have shot their tire out during the whole “screwing on a bike while hauling ass” deal. I’d point to this as the most logical explanation for the two deaths, but logic can later be chucked out of the window, as cinema need not follow the laws of the universe. We shall see.

A truck hauling a Bob's Big Boy statue (I guess he’s going in for repairs after getting molested by hooligans) lets off a hitchhiker. Four teens ready for a weekend of fun at the local lake are having issues making sense of the map. Luckily, they bump into the hitchhiker, who will guide these assholes to the promised land.

As if smacked by the hand of fate, our schmucks get a flat tire. Further complicating matters, a badged porker pulls up, and the fat goofball has to swallow his joint (he’s wearing a spiked bracelet, Godzilla t-shirt, and a denim jacket with the sleeves cut off, for whatever that’s worth). However, things work out after all. They fix the tire, elude the tyranny of the man, and take a side road to a creepy old house and decide to stay the night…oh, never mind.

Interestingly, sitting on the front lawn is a monument of the dented black car, placed on a stone slab, complete with blood stains and a photo of a girl. Even more ominously, the second floor window suddenly closes, which the fat guy thinks was done by a "biohazard mutant zombie". On top of all of this, it starts to downpour, scaring the bejeezus out of Helen, who runs off for the safety of the deep dark woods. The hitchhiker kicks the door down, some false scare birds jump out of a closet, and everyone immediately decides to inspect the cellar. As Peter eloquently observes, "muthafucka, there are coffins in the basement!". Things become even more ominous when Helen, after wandering in the woods for awhile, gets her throat slit.

Well, I guess you know where this is headed. The gang never waivers in its desire to spend the night in the shadiest of domiciles, even when they happen upon a collection of human scalps, not to mention a photo book of nude corpses (yay nudity!). They also find various sassy photographs of a live girl (more nudity…yippee!), who in fact is still living in the house, a nutball trapped in a past of former modeling glories (shades of Silent Scream). The "actress" is played by Jennifer Delora of Robot Holocaust and some other crap, wearing a creepy porcelain mask. Even the walls occasionally crack (a la Repulsion), symbolically representing the fracturing psyche of the girl.

She and the house have now become symbiotic; two decaying bedfellows that are remnants of a happier, less bat-shit crazy time. If that wasn't enough already, through the ubiquitous expository newspaper headline, we learn that the hitchhiker is on the lam, but, alas, ain’t no sheep.

These kids are a curious bunch, eager to investigate any and all suspicious noises and disturbances, but not equipped to do so. They eventually become dead certain that they are in fact being slaughtered, so they head for the car, but the battery has been stolen (I bet it’s those damn hoodlums that “compromised” the Big Boy statue). Fatty and his girl head to the road to wave down a passing vehicle and, luckily, some creep picks them up. Unfortunately, the creep slits fatty’s throat in slow-mo (I should’ve seen that coming), and his girl escapes through the woods, supplemented by the ever popular owl insert.

She ends up back at the house and finally tries the telephone, but unfortunately, some asshole forgot to pay the bill. Jennifer finally pulls off the mask, showing off her deformed face. I’m guessing this must have contributed to the downfall of her modeling career, but she blames her unceremonious intruders for her unfortunate complexion.

A handy flashback finally explains everything. We see the naked bikers from earlier with their clothes on, riding along, harassing the shit out of Jennifer and her dad in that black car. This causes them to veer off the road and crash, and consequently, become crazy retard killers. Not only do they kill the bikers, but they strip them naked and leave them in the middle of the road. If that wasn’t enough revenge, they come back to the scene and retrieve the bodies, and then hide them behind a wall in the house for curious teenagers to happen upon. There’s also that car monument thing on the front lawn. Whatever helps you cope I guess.

Well, the pork patrol actually comes to the rescue, plugging the dad and whisking away the final girl to certain safety. Everything is finally hunky dory, a tangled web of conspiracy and conjecture laid down through stone cold logic. I admit to jumping the gun, wrongly assuming that the naked corpses were truly victims, completely free of blame. I think we can all learn a lesson from my failure here, that is, to be aware of, and be able to defeat, any and all assumptions when rationally examining something. After all, human beings are…holy shit! Jennifer suddenly appears at the cop car window, yelling “I’ll kill you bitch!” at the final girl. I just totally lost my train of thought. Well, who cares, that final jump scare was fucking awesome. I hope I didn’t give it away.

The credits roll to an "atmospheric" synth job that vaguely sounds like South Park’s Phillip Glass parody. This wave of sensuous electro brain massage leaves me to ponder many things…but mostly, I stop to ponder the final girl. Instead of the usual virtuous young woman, we get the slutty biker chick dressed in red.

Why does she survive when all of her dear friends are processed into cold cuts? I think the answer is in her most glaring character trait; she’s fucking the annoying fat ass in the Godzilla shirt. Like Mother Theresa before her, she is reserved a place in heaven (or in this case, gets to keep all of her limbs) for previous acts of charity. God bless her.

P.S. The director is Spaniard Jose Ramon Larraz, and I'd like to think he adds a bit of gothic euro stylishness to pure 80's American cheese. Perhaps that's wishful thinking on my part.

EDGE OF THE AXE (1988) - an exterminator, an axe murderer, a computer nerd, the women that love them, and the tangled web of murder between them

The Michael Myers retread in Edge of the Axe starts things off with a unique approach to axing innocent victims. In broad daylight, on a busy street, he saunters into a car wash and plants his axe through a lady’s windshield while she drives through the fucking car wash. As absurd as this might seem, it does look pretty damn cool, especially in slow-mo. On second thought, it sorta seems logical, since those suds and big brushes can take care of a lot of evidence. Not to mention, in a car wash, no one can hear you scream. Sort of like space.

Soon after, some chick finds the head of a pig in her bed. I guess the killer is responsible, possibly intending it to be a warning to members of the pork patrol, trying to dissuade them from investigating any local car wash murders. Either that, or it’s some sort of obtuse Godfather reference.

This sets the stage, as it were, but the story is really about two schmucks, one a computer nerd, the other an exterminator. The setting is apparently somewhere in rural California, and you get quite a good feel for the locale, what with the many driving shots of the town. The cynics might complain these shots are there to pad the run time, but it's their own faults they can't comprehend the simple pleasures of staring at redwood trees for five minutes.

Interest is piqued when the exterminator investigates a smell in a bar and finds a corpse. They are hardly concerned, it would seem, with the dead body and the news of the car wash murder, and they just giggle their way over to another bar, where they drink up a storm with two pretty hot chicks (you only live once I guess, and anybody can die at any time, so relax a little). The nerd even accepts a wager from one of the girls over a game of “Alien”, which, surprisingly, is a bit of an aphrodisiac. I think I’ve finally found a solution to my problems with women…oh wait, it looks like they invented it for the movie. Goddamnit.

The nerd’s new girl is truly a godsend. She’s beautiful, kicks ass at video games, and likes nothing but to spend all day with the nerd while he explains his computers to her. However, even I am admittedly impressed with what this guy is towing. It’s circa 1986, and dude has got both a rudimentary internet and an archaic form of e-mail, and looks to have developed an early form of artificial intelligence. I was still dicking around on my Commodore 64 at the time. Not only that, all of this stuff helps him get laid. Asshole.

So, a bar floozy also gets the axe (her being a slut is probably irrelevant; I just like typng the word “floozy”), and the exterminator hears about it but is still not overly concerned. He's too busy spending a carefree afternoon on the lake, in a speed boat with his hot new girlfriend (despite the fact that he’s married to an annoying hag). The lady that found the pig head is the next to get the axe, and I’m reminded of the earlier scene where her husband told the cop about the severed pork noggin, and the piggy (the one with his head intact) told him that there was nothing they could do about it. You’d think the pork officer would want vengeance for his fellow swine, but alas, no. Apparently, he is only out to protect and serve his own donut shoveling ass.

The killer's connection to the two “heroes” is finally cemented when the exterminator’s wife is murdered, but this hypocrite of a husband just thinks she ran off with another dude. In the meantime, the final girl (the nerd’s new chick) spends a lot of time in church and on the nerd’s magical interweb, researching the case of the axe killer and sending instant messages to her new beau. She is key, as you might imagine, to the confusing twist ending.

The director is Jose Ramon Larraz, one of the pseudo masters of Spanish horror, and he injects some Argento-esque style into the murders to separate the film from its otherwise regional slasher trash roots. It’s sort of like taking a trip to northern California with a couple of schmucks, to one of these Redwood preserve towns, and occasionally a cut-rate giallo breaks out.