Straight-to-DVD Corner with Tonn Slingdog: It’s Back!

Yeah, it’s been awhile.  I’d like to say that’s because I’ve been so busy with work I haven’t had time to see any DTV movies, but that’s so very sadly not the case.  The truth is, I’ve seen a shitload and they’ve all been so dull I refused to spend any more time on them, even if complaining may have alleviated the horrible rage that grows inside of me each day.  However, after a terrible dryspell I got lucky!  Two times!  (Hopefully my career will follow suit, goddammit.)

One time, it’s Martyrs, a movie that’s subtitled because it’s from some other country that doesn’t have the common decency to speak English.  And while the story of this picture show offers nothing new (in fact, it plays like a series of twenty minute remakes of Funny Games, The Ring, Hostel, and Hellraiser) and ultimately ends in a rather pretentious and completely unsatisfying manner…well, who the hell cares?  From scene to scene it is unbelievably violent, including a sequence of shotgun homicides which is one of the best I have ever seen.  It manages to be scary from time to time, too, so if you look at it as a kind of serialized sequence of short horror shows, you’ll have a great old time.  And you might actually puke.

Two times, and it’s Return to Sleepaway Camp, which I expected to be duller than hell, but I gave it a try anyway because of my fondness for the original.  Boy, was I surprised!  It was a sequel certainly worthy of its predecessor.  For the unitiated, Sleepaway Camp was a low budget rip-off of the already low budget Friday the 13th (the one from eighties, not the one from Michael Bay’s horror remake factory) and easily the best of too many to count.  It was shoestring, the acting amateurish to put it kindly, but it was pretty damn funny, had some imaginative slashings, and it boasted a twist ending that predated The Crying Game by nine years.  This new one, the third sequel, keeps the tradition rolling nicely.  And while, like the original, it doesn’t have enough money to keep the killings rolling at a good pace, it does fill in all the dead space with a ludicrous amount of yelling.  I like yelling.  It worked in Crimson Tide, and it works here, too.  You’ve never seen a summer camp filled with so many mean-spirited and spiteful people.  I nearly bust a gut laughing, man.  And it’s got Isaac Hayes.

So, good DTV viewing, Pigs People.

Or not.

Send me money.  Tonn.

2 thoughts on “Straight-to-DVD Corner with Tonn Slingdog: It’s Back!”

  1. The first half of MARTYRS is utterly brilliant. And while I did admire where the film went in its second half I’m still one the fence as to whether I actually ‘like’ how it ended.

    Needless to say this is sure to be a very divisive film among horror fans. It’s full of ideas and God knows, we don’t see too many of them these days.

  2. I found Martyrs to be meh. Pretty overrated and though the first half was alright, the second half devolves into repetition that bored me to tears. And to have that violence justifed by faux-intellectualism was pretty funny. If you enjoy a girl being beat up by a big man for an obscene amount of time have at it…

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