The Sleeper 2012 Review

The Sleeper 2012

Directed by: Justin Russell

Starring: Brittany Belland, Tiffany Arnold, Riana Ballo

Review by Luisito Joaquín González

One of the best films of last year was Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive. A stylish mix of Hollywood-noir and action flick, it was propelled by a unique blend of vulnerable, emotional background players and a restrained and mysterious protagonist in Ryan Gosling. It’s deliberate ‘false retro’ ambience gave it an almost hypnotic dream-like vibe. It felt like an eighties throwback that was comfortably seated amongst modern day conventions.

Whilst The Sleeper is nowhere near Drive in terms of its class and quality, it does fully attempt to create a similar environment for its plot to unravel within. Justin Russell has tried admirably on modest funding to capture and transport us back to the glory days of the slasher genre and in a few places, he succeeds.

Of the five-hundred or so slasher films that I have listed in my A-Z, you could say that 85% or more are based on the formula and methodology put in place by John Carpenter’s Halloween. I have often wondered why so few entries borrow from Bob Clark’s Black Christmas, which was another genre template setter that has bundles of neat pluses. Well, The Sleeper is one of those that pays tribute solely to Christmas and aims for the same style of giving its antagonist the chance to convey his presence through prank calls and eerie vocalisation.

It’s 1981 in a snow coated small American town. The girls of Alpha Gamma Theta sorority throw a party and invite two new friends that they met earlier. Unbeknownst to them, they are also joined by an ominous uninvited presence. Hiding in the shadows, he begins watching the youngsters and later continuously calling them and speaking in a spooky deranged tone. After one of the co-eds disappears during the night, the Police are called in. The snow has made travel around the location awkward however, and before long they realise that they are trapped against a vicious and maniacal killer

Shadows Run Black and Home Sweet Home. Look at those titles for a second and remember the feeling you had whilst watching them. Now these are awful movies, but they have something that I never find in more modern entries: – an abundance of charm. Whilst The Sleeper doesn’t quite capture the same charisma, it stands apart solely because it at least has the ambition to try. I admire that they have made the effort to cast our minds back to that forgotten period and even if the continuity doesn’t always live up to the intent, it does give the film an authentic allure.

I have never been the biggest fan of killers without masks, but the mysterious and barely characterised (he is billed in the credits simply as ‘The Sleeper’) nut job here does a good enough job of being a creepy bogeyman. His weapon of choice is a claw hammer, which is one that we don’t see used often enough in slasher cinema, and he stalks through the snow with an impressive air of malevolent menace. The first gore scene that we get is said tool smashing the head of a sleeping bunny and to be fair it is extremely fake and paper-mâché-like. I was thinking that the rest would be equally as rubbish, but surprisingly, some of the later murders are really well done, including a couple of gooey throat slashings. I am not sure if it was a good idea that they used the one with the worst effect first, but maybe it was better to get it out of the way as early as possible. Later, one of the girls is seen alone in a swimming pool and as we were on the whole retro/pay tribute tip, I was hoping for a rehash of the memorable hackings from either The Prowler or Fatal Games. That didn’t quite happen, but we still got a well-planned set-piece. I especially liked the hokier than hokey rolling eyes post-decap shot!

Russell’s use of sound is by far the film’s most credible strength. He has put together a decent retro-ish accompaniment on his pocket-money budget and the score during the horror scenes is classy and neat. He manages to pull off the odd shock too and some of his low-angled cinematography is brilliantly structured and very impressive. The long, wide-panned views of the frost coated streets really helped to build the claustrophobia of the small town in peril and the aforementioned haunting theme sets it all off perfectly. There’s a tense chase sequence towards the end, some very good POV stalking shots and a classic slashertastic conclusion that no feature that’s following the typical guidelines should be without. The acting is fairly wooden throughout, but not as bad as others that I have seen and even if the script does have a few glaring inconsistencies, it gets the job done.

By far my favourite part of the movie – and if you love your slashers served with a slice of cheese on top, then you’ll enjoy it too – was the dance scene. Oh my gawd. Think the Lightening Strikes sequence from Small Town Massacre, but worse…much worse. This is where Justin Russell is really showing his knowledge of the category. 80s slashers WERE cheesy and it’s one of the best things for us to notice now when we look back. I read a review somewhere online that was really critical for including this, but obviously that writer didn’t get the joke. I did; and it was surely only played for laughs. They even do the ‘staying alive’ jig…!

I mentioned earlier about the continuity not doing as much as the determination to keep us believing that it’s 1981 and it is perhaps one of the main disappointments about The Sleeper. Whilst $30,000 is very small in terms of a production budget, I think that the wardrobe department could have done a better job to make the girls look more ‘eighties-like’. Their hairstyles and clothes are all very modern and if you caught the feature halfway through, you would never in a million years guess that it was aiming to transport us back thirty years in to the past. You’ve all been to eighties parties, right? You all know how to dress. It’s just a shame that they didn’t work a tiny bit harder with the look of the characters to add the finishing touch. Blood Junkie did a much better job and that was made for similar funds. Also, the rotary-dial phone was a neat addition, but it’s just a bit weird that they forgot about it when decorating the Police chief’s office. It’s either that they didn’t notice, or he had been time traveling and grabbed himself a digital touch-tone and brought it back from the future to show off to his colleagues on the force 😉

The IMDB has numerous user reviews listed for this feature, but they are bewildering and a terrible guide for prospective audiences. There are one or two that have rated the movie as a 10/10, which leads me to believe that they were written by people with an affiliation to the production team as a form of prior marketing. Then there are many that are at a stingy 1/10, which is the complete opposite end of the scale and it seems like they were posted by someone with something against those behind the flick or the director. A more realistic score would be 5.5 as The Sleeper has some really nice and interesting touches. Slasher films are meant to be fun and I can only appreciate the fact that someone would have enough love for the genre to go the full hog and helm a real tribute. A tribute that even references the time when horror and in particular slasher cinema was really hot stuff.

I hope that we get to see a few more titles this year and I would also like to see another effort from señor Russell in the near future

Slasher Trappings:

Killer Guise:

Gore: √√√

Final Girl:√√

RATING:

Small Town Massacre 1981Review

Small Town Massacre 1981

aka Dead Kids, Strange Behaviour, Human Experiments, Shadowlands

Director Michael Laughlin

Starring, Michael Murphy, Louise Fletcher, Fiona Lewis, Arthur Digman, Dan Shor.

Review by Luisjo González

I have already written reviews of this for other websites, but it’s one that I wanted to update a little, because it holds a very special place for me amongst the billions of slashers that I’ve watched and I think it’s an underrated gem of a feature.

I recently picked up the DVD version quite cheaply as Strange Behaviour (this flick has more ‘aka’s’ than a secret agent), but have chosen to post it under my favourite title, Small Town Massacre. It was this copy that I found in my local corner shop (which also offered a selection of videos to rent – including some of the, ahem, XXX variety out the back… Those were the days!). I had seen Halloween and I was hunting for similar titles, but I wasn’t even aware that they were part of a sub-genre called ‘Slasher’

I don’t have the greatest concentration span even now, so you can imagine that as a ten-year-old, I never really understood the plot or even that it was different in anyway from the other slashers that I had seen. However I always recalled the awesome party scene and the claustrophobic final sequence, which still holds-up quite well.

Some of the best slasher action of the golden period –

A sleepy suburban town in Illinois becomes the target of a maniac killer when bodies of the local townsfolk’s teenage children begin turning up hacked up and dismembered. The Police are stumped as to who it is that’s slashing his way through the community, but things are far more mysterious than they initially seem…

Now Small Town Massacre is not a typical slasher movie – I mean in the Halloween rip-off kind of way. Director Michael Laughlin had an idea of a plot and included enough to make his movie appeal to the category’s fanbase, which was big in 1981. Clearly too intelligent a director to flagrantly imitate his inspirations, he instead pays homage with a few instantly recognisable nods. One of those is a stand out scene where the killer in a great mask (Tor Johnson – the wrestler/actor) stalks two teens parked in a secluded lane. There’s some great imagery and shots of the assailant lurking in the bushes and then picking off the male as he has to exit the vehicle, only to return to murder his unsuspecting partner. I honestly think that it is one of the best teen-kill set pieces of the golden era and you can’t really get any more ‘slasher trademark’ than that sequence.

Like the majority of eighties children that emigrated to London, my family were quite poor and I was brought up during my earliest years listening to old 7” singles on the grimy record player in our front room (we didn’t even have TV) and so I have maintained a fondness for the music of the the rock and roll generation, which my mum adored. That probably contributes to my love for this slasher because much like John Carpenter’s Christine, it boasts a deliberate retro ambiance that recalls the age of innocence and the locality of close-knit communities of the fifties/sixties. Suspense is built not by sharp editing or hokey gore, but by the storytelling. Deeply developed characters and well-worked relationships help to bring a ‘small town’ vibe to the plot and it gives the film a unique personality, which includes people that you actually care about in key roles.

Whilst talking about retro, we cannot forget to mention the (now) notorious scene where a bunch of teens dance in tandem to Lou Christie’s ‘Lighting Strikes’ whilst dressed as sixties TV characters. It’s an amazing sequence, because it doesn’t feel out of place and the story is so well delivered that the mood can change in an instant. The choice of song (writer Bill Condon’s favourite – the guy has taste) is another bonus from an already outstanding soundtrack, which sees Tangerine Dream keep the tone perfectly. – If you’re gonna mix former Rock and Roll teen idol Christie with a masked killer, you’ve got to be a man with ambition.

The choice of cast is notable for selecting actors based on talent and experience rather than status, which is exactly what the feature needed to maintain the closeness of the characters. There are solid turns from Fletcher and Dignam, whilst Lewis did a credible job as the sadistic nurse (She created a character that’s so easy to hate). The film really belongs however to Murphy, Shor and Young for the strength and chemistry of their relationships. There’s a scene in the beginning where Murphy and Shor engage in a conversation (about shaving) like a father and son would do and it’s moments like these that add welcome depth to the characterisations. I liked the microwave romance between the two ambitious lead youngsters and the warmth of the witty dialogue. It’s no surprise that Condon would later get an Oscar nod for his writing skills.

Producer Antony Ginnane harboured desires of getting Australian horror (or Ozploitation) on the map during the early eighties and this was one (arguably the best) of a number of features that he was involved with. I was surprised to learn that this was in fact an Australian production, as it has an almost entirely American cast and strong continuity to keep everything in check. It was filmed in Auckland (the first time for a horror film), but you’d never notice that it wasn’t a small Illinois town as the plot describes.

As I said earlier, the film relies on it’s storytelling to provide a fear factor and there’s no gratuitous gore, but there’s a nasty syringe pushed into an eyeball scene, which is very hard to watch. When the killer(s) strike, there’s enough creativity in the murder scenes to show that Laughlin had done his homework on the slasher genre and the ending is authentic, unexpected and intelligently conveyed.

The luscious wide lensed photography must’ve looked amazing in the cinema, with long tracking shots of the New Zealand countryside, but the transfer to VHS was terrible and cropped the visuals catastrophically. Thankfully DVD has solved that problem and the plasma generation can enjoy the beautiful photography as it was meant to be seen.

Aside from some cack-handed editing in places, there’s really very little wrong with Small Town Massacre. A neat and extremely underrated chiller that boasts enough of the necessary ingredients to sit amongst it’s slasher brethren from the period.

I truly believe that Small Town Massacre is overlooked and somewhat mis-understood and should stand much higher as a successful mix of cinematic styles and great performances from a note-perfect cast.

 Slasher Trappings:

Killer Guise: √√√

Gore √

Final Girl √√√√√

RATING: