WITCHTRAP

WITCHTRAP is the film that killed my first VCR. I arrived home one Saturday afternoon, a bag full of tapes in my hand. My mom was going out with my aunts. My sister was busy with her boyfriend. My dad just wanted to be left alone. I had the run of the place. The living room belonged to me and me alone. So down I sat, hopefully for some great bared breasts and awe-inspiring spilled blood. I popped WITCHTRAP in the VCR and it roared to life. I reached the 20 mark of the film when suddenly the VCR made a horrible, mechanical noise, what I imagine an Autobot fart would sound like had Autobots possessed bowels and assholes. And then… nothing. The tape lodged itself deep inside the guts of my beloved VCR, strangling it to death.

And somehow this was all my fault.

I got yelled at quite a bit that day. Did I push the tape in too hard? Was I fucking around with it as it played, maybe dropping it or throwing it against the wall? Nope. I just put the damn tape in and was sitting there waiting for the inevitable display of nudity from Linnea Quigley when the damn thing just died. The video rental shop made my dad buy a replacement copy of the film. From the growls he made into the phone, it couldn’t have been cheap. We would have to wait a full two months before the repair shop called and informed us that we could pick my dearest friend from the hospital. Those two months were the longest two months of my life. 

I never did get around to finishing WITCHTRAP. I had never bothered to rent the film again. I’ve never been the superstitious type, but I feared what would happen if I rented it again and tried to watch it. Maybe this time it would catch fire instead of simply getting wrapped around the heads and pulling them out of place. But here I am today with a shiny, new Blu-ray/DVD combo pack copy of the movie. I decided to watch the DVD on my old laptop just to be safe.

Well, my old laptop survived the experience unscathed, but my brain cells sure didn’t. WITCHTRAP is an exceedingly stupid movie, horribly acted and written to boot. The plot is 45% The Haunting of Hill House, 5% GHOSTBUSTERS (no joke, there are ghost traps in this movie) and 50% bullshit. A group of special investigators spend the day in a supposedly haunted Gothic mansion in an attempt to prove the existence of evil spirits, all so the owner of the property can repackage the place into a haunted bed and breakfast tourist trap. The leader of the investigation is Dr. Agnes Goldberg, a spiritualist who is also, for no apparent reason, an atheist. Her husband, a mental medium, tags along, as does Whitney, a physical medium (and yes, the film explains the difference). Oh, and Linnea Quigley plays a video technician named Ginger whose sole job is to set up a single tripod, easily the best bit of casting in the entire film.

Then there’s the trio of security officers, one of whom is a skeptic with a bad attitude, a personality quirk that got him fired from the police force even though he’s apparently so damn good at his job that he can crack a 20+ year cold case in 8 weeks. They’ve been brought along to ensure the safety of the Scooby Gang, though I’m really not sure what good a gun would do against the ghost of an ex-serial killer warlock. But as there is a creepy, overweight peeping tom / groundskeeper wandering around, it’s better to be safe than sorry.

Truth be told, there’s a bit more going on in WITCHTRAP than you might expect. There are discussions of reality, the nature of belief and even a brief debate on theodicy. There is a short conversation about evil and whether evil is a kind of metaphysical force or merely a product of human nature. There is talk of God and the devil and the afterlife, and all the other bits and pieces of discourse that might pop up in a film all about conflicting metaphysical points of view. Shame then that the dialogue doesn’t adequately address any of those topics, coming off as middle school banter rather than educated thought. It also doesn’t help that the actors are all stiff, their voices all dubbed by people who sound like they were just woken up in the middle of the night by the sound of their careers crashing and burning.

The dialogue in this film swings wildly, sometimes risible, often times atrocious, sometimes a bit racist, and often times damn near unintelligible. Every character is flat and lifeless, with motivations that change from scene to scene. According to IMDb, the screenplay for WITCHTRAP was completed in just six days and hot damn, does it show. The dialogue is so unbelievably stilted and devoid of nuance. If you took a foreign screenplay and sent it through Google Translate, this is how the dialogue would read. There isn’t a single line in this film that feels natural.

But then again, nothing in this film feels natural. Nothing even makes sense. I could fill three reviews with all the inconsistencies and unexplained shifts in motivation. I could fill the next paragraph without trying, just rambling off things that either make no sense or ruin the tonal consistency of the film. Here, watch me go.

Oh man, supernatural stuff is going down, better call the police. Oh no, we just found our friend dead in the bathroom, better keep ghost hunting. Oh no, we just found that one cop that we all hated dead in the bedroom, better get out of the house quick. Damn, the gate has been padlocked, I guess I won’t bother climbing that four foot wall right beside it. There’s a car speeding towards me!, better not try to move out of the way. Bullet hits the gas tank of a van, van doesn’t explode. Bullet misses the van entirely, van explodes. This urn is clearly the source of the warlock’s power, better just leave it on the mantle place. Oh no, someone stole the battery out of the car, better not just walk off the property. Phone’s dead!, sucks that we’re like a half mile from town. Behold! I’m an all-powerful Satanic warlock reborn in the flesh, guess I’ll just punch this guy to death. I’m an atheist, though I still believe in Satan. Man watches as a knife is magically thrown at him from halfway across the room, nah there’s gotta be a rational explanation for that.

This movie sucks.

I know a lot of people will watch WITCHTRAP and walk away thinking “wow, what great schlock!”. No, sir. This isn’t great schlock. This is what schlock looks like once the sell by date has passed. This is rotten schlock, schlock that needs to be thrown away. This movie could have been fun were it not for the fact that it is so damn incompetent. There is no pulse to it, just 90 minutes of boring bullshit and badly executed sight gags. Worse, about 70 of those minutes are shot in the day time so all attempts at atmosphere and spooks are for naught. You can’t be scared when the movie looks THIS bad. You can’t be entertained when every single line of dialogue sounds THIS bad. And no, you can’t make it all better by having Linnea Quigley strip down for a shower scene or include a shot of a man’s head exploding. You can’t wallpaper a turd.

GRADUATION DAY

GRADUATION DAY comes roaring to life, all montage and disco music. Look at all the college aged high schoolers! Look, there's someone pole vaulting! Look, there's someone jumping hurdles! Look, someone is doing gymnastics! Oh oh oh! Someone is running track! And listen to that slamming disco beat! Man, this is 

Sorry. I had to double check that I'm actually reviewing GRADUATION DAY and not FATAL GAMES.

So anyway, once the montage has tuckered itself out, we get to the grand instigation, the unfortunate death of a track and fielder as she crosses the finish line. The poor dead girl's name is Laura. The cause of death? A blood clot. Her boyfriend, Kevin, is moderately bummed about her passing, but everyone else just moves right along with their lives. It is, after all, graduation week.

Laura's sister, an ensign stationed in Guam, returns home, not for the funeral but to accept her dead sister's diploma in the graduation ceremony. She exchanges pleasantries with Kevin before all but disappearing from the first half of the movie. Meanwhile, the high school coach is on his way out, the blame for Laura's sudden death landing square in his overbearing lap. And the principle is having an affair with his blonde secretary, who is oh so cleverly named Blondie. And there's a pot smoking cop wandering around campus. And the music teacher is having sex with one of his students.

If you're wondering what any of these things have to do with one another, well… I don't have a fucking clue. I mean, there IS an unknown killer stalking and slashing Laura's teammates in hilariously cheap fashion, but the slasher action is so separated from all the other myriad bits of extraneous plot that the murders seem to be happening in a different movie altogether. It takes the film approximately 70 minutes before it remembers that its been offing teenagers left and right. In an attempt to cover that gaping plot hole, another cop makes a sudden appearance for no other reason than to say “yeah so like uhh a bunch of parents just realized that their uhh kids are missing sooooo...”

I would argue that the majority of the events in this film serve absolutely no purpose. Exactly what purpose does the principle serve, or his secretary, or the pothead cop, or the music teacher? None. They serve no purpose in the film whatsoever. Because this is a slasher film, right? So shouldn't we be spending time with the victims BEFORE we kill them off? Shouldn't they have personalities? Shouldn't they be, in some way, large or small, tied into the film instead of just lumped into the body count? I literally finished watching GRADUATION DAY 45 minutes ago. I cannot remember a single character's name outside of Blondie, Laura and Kevin. That's a huge problem.

And really, so is the motive for the killer. Believe me, within a half hour you will guess the identity of the killer. It's Kevin, the boyfriend, the only person who seems to remember (besides the coach anyway) that someone died at their school (and right in front of them, I might add) just a few days ago. But what exactly is the reason for Kevin's murder spree? It wasn't anyone's fault that Laura died of a blood clot. That kind of thing just happens. I mean, you could blame the coach, I guess. So kill the coach and be done with it. Why bother killing Laura's friends when they had absolutely nothing to do with it? I just recently reviewed PROM NIGHT. Watch the two films back to back and you'll see how this kind of thing should be done.

It would be like my 95 year old grandmother dying in her sleep and as a result, I decide to start butchering the employees of my local GameStop. That's how absurd the whole thing is. But even if we just forget the motive, the actual slashing in this slasher film is pathetic. For starters, the film does this weird thing of always having its characters walking along the same path in the woods, like these people are oblivious to the fact that their city has things called “streets”. A character (or two) will be shown walking along then the killer will casually stroll up behind them to put them out of their misery (and sometimes the knife the killer is carrying will literally be shooting blood out of its fake blade well before it even touches flesh). The indoor murder sequences are the same damn thing. The killer walks up behind his victim, the victim turns and says “what are you doing?”, and then BOOM. A piss poor effect will momentarily flash before our eyes and another person we don't care about disappears from the film. I mean, did these filmmakers really think they were being creative by having the killer stick a sword blade inside of a football before tossing it into someone's gut? I don't even need to go down the route of “dude, the ball would just deflate the second the blade ent...”. I don't even need to finish that sentence because the logic of it all doesn't matter. It's simply an idiotic scene. The fact that it is the single most memorable murder in the whole film says it all.

And when you have a slasher full of lazy set pieces, terrible special effects, and non-characters with non-personalities only doing things unrelated to the slasher business at hand, you have a film not worth recommending to anyone. I would love to tell you that there is some camp appeal to be had in GRADUATION DAY or that the cast (which includes Linnea Quigley, Christopher George, E. Danny Murphy and Michael Pataki) makes it all worth it, but I just cannot do that. This movie is terrible, no two ways about it. Stay away. Stay far, far away.

KIDNAPPED GIRLS AGENCY

KIDNAPPED GIRLS AGENCY might as well have been called TYING KNOTS: THE MOVIE. It is ostensibly a soft core porno with a BDSM bent. I don't know much about the BDSM scene. I prefer my sex like I prefer every other avenue of my life, pain free. I don't take much pleasure in watching people having pins shoved through their breasts or drooling from behind ball gags. I get that BDSM is quote-unquote safe sadism with a particular and emphatic emphasis on consent but… It's just not for me. Turns out, neither is this film.

It's not for anyone really. I can't imagine BDSM lovers getting much of a thrill out of it, especially when there are much better films out there that deal with that kind of thing. Given that we're living in the internet age, softcore porn itself is kind of pointless. Back when I was a kid, softcore porn was a godsend. These days it's like eating a bowl of cereal without the cereal. And what's a bowl of cereal without the cereal? It's just a goddamn bowl of milk. 

Now that analogy was awful, but so is this movie. Why is that important? It's not. I'm just trying to avoid writing this review.

The only reason this movie is worth watching is for Linnea Quigley and Michelle Bauer. In 1985, Quigley was fresh out of SILENT NIGHT, DEADLY NIGHT and Bauer was fresh out of porn. On any normal day, the presence of either Scream Queen would be enough to get my blood rushing, but KIDNAPPED GIRLS AGENCY is so irredeemably awful that neither actress can save it. Quigley plays Cathy, a college aged girl who is kidnapped by Vera, her ex-step mother, and held for ransom. Vera has a co-conspirator named Brett. The two deviants tie Cathy up in some rope and transport her to the Whip and Chains Club, a BDSM themed sex dungeon of sorts. They also kidnap Tina, Cathy's roommate, subjecting her to the same bondage and light whipping.

Cathy's father contacts the titular Kidnapped Girls Agency, a two person operation specializing in finding, you guessed it, kidnapped girls. As Vera and Brett wait for the ransom to come in, they flirt with the idea of selling the girls to sex traffickers. Luckily, the bumbling head of the KGA, played by the films writer/director, and his sexy assistant, played by Bauer, arrive just in the nick of time, sparing Tina from a rape via strap-on. Cathy is then rescued, shoots Brett dead and the film just ends. Viva la cinema.

This film is 60 minutes long. 40 of those 60 minutes is spent watching a man tie up a woman. Then they untie her, lightly flog her with a whip and then tie her up again. Then they do the same thing to another woman. And then they do it all over again. Like, I get it. This is a fetish movie and while I know for a fact that a lot of people like watching this sort of thing. I am not one of those people. By the 45 minute mark, I swore that if I watched one more person draw one more knot I would tie my own rope.

Around my neck.

But the thing is, this could have been sexy. Naked women usually are, especially when those naked woman include Linnea Quigley and Michelle Bauer. But this film is a shot on video, low effort affair.

It's difficult to find a scene sexually or emotionally arousing when you can see the director's hand clasping the side of the lens as the scene plays out. That's bad enough, but nearly every scene in this film is shot with actors in profile with little to no editing or movement of the camera. There's very little film in this film, just stationary camera work, shoddy audio and little in the way of anything other than tying goddamn knots for 40 minutes.

Things do perk up a bit in the finale when writer/director (and self proclaimed kung fu cinema guru) Ric Meyers, a man who has either the most celebratory Wikipedia page ever or, depending on who actually wrote it, the most masturbatory Wikipedia page ever, and Michelle Bauer enter the film in force. At that point, KIDNAPPED GIRLS AGENCY becomes a campy sex comedy, albeit one with wannabe white slave traders as lead villains. But it's all too little too late, I'm afraid, because even the inclusion of strap-on slapstick can't wash away the horrid taste of the proceeding 40 minutes of unappealing amateur fetish porn.

So again, I'm not quite sure who the hell I would ever recommend this film to. It certainly isn't fun or sexy. It most definitely isn't well made. And if you're into BDSM, there are much better films out there for you to watch. Just skip this one and rent MAITRESSE instead.

Although KIDNAPPED GIRLS AGENCY does have 100% less dicks being nailed to boards so… Take that into consideration when you choose between the two.