With Halloween inching ever closer, we're sticking with the Jamie Lee Curtis slasher theme here. Next up is 1980's Prom Night. The trailer for this is so great, let's not waste any time and just get to it:
If I could pick one early '80s slasher trailer as being the most emblematic of the sub-genre, it'd have to be Prom Night. That is the slasher genre's golden age, right there, encapsulated in all its cheesy glory. No kid who saw this trailer back in the day wasn't 100% sold.
Thanks to a speedy turnaround that gave Prom Night its TV premiere a scant seven months after playing theaters, when excitement for the movie was still fresh, underage kids like me who missed out on Prom Night on the big screen got to watch it in the comfort of home!
For anyone who wasn't there, let me tell you - it was a big deal!
I believe it's the fact that its network TV airing put it in front of so many impressionable eyes, many of them in pre-cable, pre-VCR households at the time, that gave Prom Night such a foothold in the consciousness of Gen-X horror fans. Fans of a certain age will swear to you that it's a good movie, maybe even a horror classic, but in fact it's pretty lousy.
I've got all kinds of affection for it, sure, but it's bad. And it's such a weird Jamie Lee Curtis horror film in that her character, being the beloved sister of the killer, is never actually in any jeopardy. You'd think that Curtis should have been one of the kids whose thoughtless behavior leads to Robin Hammond's death. Ideally, she should have been the "good girl" of the group who carried remorse for her actions.
She should have been the character of Kelly that Mary Beth Rubens plays but, obviously, have her not die early on but instead survive to be the Final Girl and confront the killer in the climax. But they didn't do that so Prom Night stands as the one Jamie Lee slasher film in which she's never in any real peril, making it low on actual suspense.
Then again, I kind of think Prom Night's tepidness played in its favor to a younger audience. It was just scary enough for kids to feel like they were watching a "real" contemporary horror movie like Friday the 13th but it wasn't hardcore enough to actually traumatize them.
It was like a slasher movie version of an underhand pitch. It's a softball movie that gave a lot of young kids their earliest taste of a grittier type of horror before they were ready to graduate to the next level. Although its protagonists were high schoolers, I believe that Prom Night's greatest admirers were strictly of the less jaded junior high set.
It's kind of crazy to think that in just a week, the new Halloween will hit theaters and we'll get to see Jamie Lee Curtis facing off with a masked maniac again. But as nostalgic as it is to think of Jamie Lee returning to the Halloween franchise in particular, just seeing her return to horror period conjures fond memories of her early '80s Scream Queen heyday. Laurie Strode may be her most iconic horror character but the rest of Curtis' genre legacy is also worthy of note.
My favorite JLC slasher, outside of the original Halloween, is definitely 1980's Terror Train. The most curious thing about its trailer, though, is how little it hypes the presence of Curtis herself.
You'd think that any slasher movie that had the star of Halloween would go out of its way to advertise that point but, no, based on the trailer you get the feeling that the studio thought audiences would be showing up to see the train. Weird, right? But check it out:
Maybe it was just inconceivable to studio marketing types that a horror actress would have an actual fanbase. Or maybe the thinking was that the slasher audience only cared about the body count. Whatever the case, the trailer for Terror Train doesn't even bother to play up the movie's biggest selling point, treating the movie like any generic slasher - indistinguishable from any of its many competitors.
Speaking of which, watching this trailer fills me with memories of the days when it seemed like a new slasher, that would always look like a carbon copy of the previous slasher, would open every weekend. I was too young to see R-rated movies in the theater then so I never got to see these trailers on the big screen but every time I would put on the TV between the years of around 1980 to '83, there'd be a new TV spot in heavy rotation promoting the latest slasher pic and for the longest time it seemed like it was a deluge that would never end.
Of course the slasher trend did eventually dry up - almost perfectly timed for when I was finally old enough to see slashers in the theater on my own. But it's ok, I'm not bitter!
If anything, I attribute my fondness for the slasher genre to the fact that, when it was at its peak, it was always just a little out of reach - like a train I was forever running after, desperate to hop on, but just too fast to catch.
In the late ‘70s and early ’80s, in the wake of Halloween’s record-setting success, producers were madly scrambling to grab any remaining holidays to center their own slasher movie around. As slasher films typically hinge on payback for some perceived (or actual) past betrayal or wrong, Valentine’s Day – a day famous for fostering bitter disappointments and hurt feelings – was an ideal candidate for the slasher treatment.
One of several slasher productions made in Canada in the early ‘80s (along with Prom Night, Happy Birthday to Me and Terror Train), My Bloody Valentine proved easy for slasher buffs to adore, even if the MPAA – then on a crusade to neuter the new wave of splatter films – demanded heavy cuts be made before it awarded MBV an R-rating. To have the film released with all its bloodshed intact would’ve been nice but what makes MBV work is its attention to character and atmosphere so its FX didn’t have to be its key selling point.
An uncut version of the film was finally released on DVD in 2009 in time for the release of the 3-D remake, but while it was nice to finally see more of FX master Tom Burman’s work, as it turned out it didn’t really improve upon the version that fans were already familiar with. In its original, R-rated form, MBV was all it needed to be.
Following the trend of most slashers at the time, screenwriter John Beaird and director George Mihalka lay out a whodunnit storyline involving the possible return of crazed coal miner Harry Warden to the town that he terrorized many years before. Back in the day, Warden was the sole survivor of a mine collapse (triggered by unsafe methane levels ignored by supervisors eager to get to a Valentine’s dance) which left his co-workers dead and himself trapped with their bodies for weeks.
When rescuers finally got to Harry, they found that he’d had to resort to cannibalism in order to survive. Not the kind of thing one easily bounces back from. The next Valentine’s Day, Harry took his revenge on his former supervisors, hacking them to death with a pickax and leaving a warning to never hold another Valentine’s Day dance again.
Harry became a boogeyman figure that haunted the town’s collective memory, with his grim vow being enough to keep Cupid at bay in Valentine Bluffs for at least a generation. While the town’s elders successfully squelched holiday festivities for years, those who were only children when Harry conducted his rampage have come of age and want to forget the superstitious fears of their parents and have a Valentine celebration of their own.
Believing that enough time has passed, the mayor has given his permission but that will prove to be a heartbreaking decision. Days before V-Day, the mayor and sheriff receive a heart-shaped candy box containing a torn-out human heart along with a rhyming taunt warning them to stop the dance. After receiving this, the panicked mayor and sheriff cancel all celebrations while trying to keep the grisly truth from the rest of the town.
Even though all signs point to the return of Harry Warden, the sheriff isn’t having any luck locating Valentine Bluff’s most infamous son. The asylum to which Harry was committed to has lost track of him due to bureaucratic ineptitude – not being able to determine whether he is still a patient, was released, or has died. That makes the job of the sheriff and mayor all the more difficult as they work to root out the killer, even as the maniac claims another victim.
For their part, the young people of Valentine Bluffs are blissfully ignorant of the danger they’re in and are caught up in their own personal dramas. Appropriately for a movie built around Valentine’s Day, the kids of MBV are concerned with matters of the heart above all else.
Sarah (Lori Hallier) has been dating miner Axel Palmer (Neil Affleck) since her previous boyfriend (and the mayor’s son) Jesse “T.J”’ Hanniger Jr. (Paul Kelman) abruptly left her many months ago to go build a new life for himself in the big city, beyond the slim opportunities of Valentine Bluffs. Now that the big city has served him some humble pie, T.J. has returned with his tail between his legs, back working in the coal mine with hopes of picking up where he and Sarah left off.
This notion doesn’t sit so well with Axel and the competition over Sarah looks to be a potentially bloody one. Both Axel and T.J. are surly types, prone to outbursts of violence – surely one of them could be the gas-masked slayer (an outfit that’s among the most imposing in slasherdom) stalking the town. Or maybe it’s old Hap, the cranky bartender who doesn’t care for the way these rude-ass kids don’t respect the legend of Harry Warden. As it turns out, there are plenty of red herrings to go along with all the red hearts in Valentine Bluffs.
Of course, given that My Bloody Valentine is one of the most popular slashers ever, it’s safe to say that most of you (likely all) already know who the killer is. For those rare individuals who might not, though, spoilers ahead.
In classic slasher fashion, MBV’s mystery is resolved with a climatic flashback that explains everything – sort of. Some nagging questions I’ve always had: first, why would everybody be so cavalier in discussing Harry Warden around Axel when his father was one of Harry’s original victims? We as viewers only find out at the end that Axel’s dad was one of the supervisors Harry murdered but yet the way it’s mentioned, it seems to have been common knowledge among the characters. You’d think that would’ve been an earlier point of discussion.
And the idea that Axel would want to emulate the man that had slaughtered his father seems, um, curious from a psychological standpoint. Wouldn’t he hate Harry and want to take revenge on him rather than want to carry on his legacy? But hey, so what if the logic is completely screwy? It’s a slasher movie – somebody’s got to be the killer and that’s that.
Slasher movies commonly leave room for a sequel but My Bloody Valentine left fans more primed than usual for a follow-up with the wounded but very much alive killer lurching off into the mine shafts vowing his revenge on the whole damn town. Sadly no sequel ever materialized.
On the upside, though, the 2009 remake was one of the finer remakes of recent times and came off like a genuine love letter to the original and to the slasher genre in general. The original is still unarguably the most preferred of the two MBV’s, though. Apropos to Valentine Bluffs’ major industry, it should be said that you’d have to have a real heart of coal not to have a soft spot for My Bloody Valentine.
With the ‘80s action hero ensemble The Expendables 2 currently on theater screens worldwide, it’s worth remembering that most of these men of action have dabbled in horror over the years. Bruce Willis has the ghostly hit The Sixth Sense (1999) to his credit; Arnold Schwarzennegger went toe to toe with a tenacious space-spawned hunter in the classic sci-fi/horror hybrid Predator (1987) and took on Satan in End of Days (1999); Sylvester Stallone battled a serial killer in the little-seen Eye See You (1999) and some would say that his violent cop thriller Cobra (1986) rests comfortably on the periphery of the ‘80s slasher genre. But despite the various merits of those films, I have to single out the Chuck Norris vehicle Silent Rage (1982) as a true action/horror favorite.
In Silent Rage, directed by Michael Miller and written by Edward di Lorenzo and Joseph Fraley, Chuck plays Sheriff Dan Stevens, the head lawman of a small town who finds himself at war with a relentless human killing machine. Some would say that nature alone could never create a being powerful enough to go up against Chuck Norris and the makers of Silent Rage wholeheartedly agreed, making their unstoppable maniac (Brian Libby) the Godless product of scientists who commit the mistake of reviving a homicidal killer hovering on Death’s Door.
Not only is he granted a new lease on life, but thanks to the miracle of genetic engineering, this psycho can now withstand almost any form of physical harm. The “almost” is where Chuck Norris comes in. As Silent Rage begins we meet Libby’s character of John Kirby as he wakes up in the boarding house where he’s been staying. Kirby receives a concerned call from Tom Halman, his psychiatrist (Ron Silver), and during the brief call Kirby struggles to talk while fumbling in vain for his medication.
We sense that Kirby might be losing it – especially when he tells Halman “I’m losing it, Doc! I’m looosing it!” He then proceeds to lose it, chasing his landlady through the house with an axe (complete with a nod to The Shining as Kirby leers maniacally at the landlady through the hole in the door he’s just chopped through).
This homicidal outburst, naturally, brings Chuck onto the scene. While he has back up available in the flabby form of his devoted deputy Charlie (Stephen Furst, best known as Animal House’s “Flounder”), Chuck goes in alone like the one man army that he is and, after a prolonged fight, he puts Kirby in cuffs.
Unfortunately while waiting in the back of a cruiser, Kirby breaks free and the cops on the scene have no choice but to gun him down, much to the anguished protest of Halman, who arrives too late to spare his troubled patient.
Barely alive, Kirby is taken to the medical facility where Halman works and where, it just so happens, groundbreaking genetic research is being done (not the thing you’d expect to find in a small town, but whatever). Against Halman’s ethical protests, Kirby is revived by the ambitious and scientifically ruthless Dr. Philip Spires (Steven Keats) and Spires’ devoted toady, Dr. Paul Vaughn (genre regular William Finley).
Thanks to an injection of Spires’ experimental serum, Kirby is now virtually impervious to injury. Why Spires couldn’t have waited to give the gift of invincibility to someone who wasn’t a psychotic murderer, we don’t know, but scientists in movies are prone to making catastrophically bad decisions.
Once the new and improved Kirby gets his feet on the ground, he covertly exits the lab and pays a nighttime visit to Halman – and it’s not for a therapy session. The home invasion that follows as Kirby arrives at Halman’s isolated abode is Silent Rage’s horror centerpiece as the malevolent Kirby goes after both Halman and then Halman’s wife. The scene isn’t graphically gory but instead features expertly staged suspense (a prolonged pursuit is punctuated by a surprise head slam to the wall that effectively startles, even on repeated viewings).
The towering Libby is truly sinister as Kirby and he stands out as one of the more formidable movie maniacs of the ’80s. While the majority of Halloween and Friday the 13th rip-offs that were in theaters at the time made splatter FX their selling point, Silent Rage went light on gore but applied hard-hitting action to the slasher formula.
The climax to Halloween had Michael Myers shot off the second floor balcony of the Doyle home and fall with a heavy thud on the dirt of the Doyle’s backyard but in Silent Rage, Kirby is shot through the glass window of a medical facility and plummets about five floors down to the pavement and that’s just the start of an extended climatic battle between Kirby and Sheriff Stevens (one that sees Kirby undergo a head to toe burn similar to the one that Myers endures in Halloween II).
It might not have been any direct inspiration on trends to come but certainly the stunt-heavy nature of Silent Rage did anticipate the more action-oriented approach the slasher sub-genre adopted as the ’80s went on. Once the MPAA all but outlawed gore by the mid-‘80s, it left filmmakers little choice but to turn to action as a readily exploitable, and more easily MPAA sanctioned, element.
Latter day Halloween and Friday the 13th sequels were much more aligned with action cinema than the series’ earlier films had been. Witness scenes like Michael Myers battling gun-toting members of a Haddonfield posse while on the back of a speeding pick-up truck in Halloween IV: The Return of Michael Myers (1988), the spectacular RV crash that Jason survives in 1986’s Jason Lives: Friday the 13th Part VI, or even the wink to the James Bond series seen in that film’s title sequence.
The final frames of Silent Rage left the gate wide open for a Silent Rage 2 but sadly a sequel never came about. Either the film wasn’t regarded as a big enough hit (it grossed just under $11 million in US theaters) or else Norris was simply on to bigger things as his career was moving into its peak years with hits like Lone Wolf McQuade (1983), Code of Silence (1985), and others.
Norris is regarded these days as something of a camp character – especially by younger fans who, thanks to late night host Conan O’Brien, think of him first and foremost from the long running TV series Walker, Texas Ranger (1993-2001) – but Silent Rage is a good example of the straight-forward B-fare he originally made his name on.
As a reminder of an earnest exploitation era when slasher films and Chuck Norris pictures were two of the best reasons to go to the movies, Silent Rage endures as a satisfying and high-kicking genre hybrid.
