Silver Screams: Bloody Murder (2000-dir. Ralph E. Portillo)

Let's start at the end: the killer is the summer camp director Patrick, who is actually Nelson Hammond who killed the real Patrick and took his place because 30 years previous Nelson almost drowned in the lake during a prank gone wrong, perpetrated by Tommy McConnell (who was pretending to be Trevor Moorehouse who is a urban legend chainsaw murderer who may or may not exist) and condoned by camp director-turned-crazed-forest-hermit Henry, leading Nelson/Patrick to try to kill McConnell's daughter Julie and all her friends when they become camp counselors while trying to alternately frame her boyfriend Jason, another counselor named Dean, a new girl named Drew who is mysteriously obsessed with Julie and admits to having serious anger issues about her father's mysterious death, and the mythical Trevor Moorehouse who, again, may or may not actually exist.

I've seen this movie three times and I understand the above sentence about as much as you do. There's a scene at the end where the sheriff is bringing in Nelson (the killer doesn't get his comeuppance in this one, he just gets shot in the arm and kind of sighs) and asks "I can see in some twisted way why you’d kill Dean and Brad and Whitney. But why Doug? Doug never did anything to you." It's at this point in the film, three minutes before the end credits, that I learned this movie features a character named Doug. Doug? Who the hell is Doug? I went back through my extensive notes, where I transcribed every event of the movie, with no mention of Doug. A mistake? A marginal character who got cut from the final edit? After further research (looking this movie up on one of those horror movie sites that list kills) I learned that Doug is indeed a character and, in fact, gets one of the more memorable deaths with a lawn dart through the chest. But I thought Doug was Brad. The issue is that every male character in Bloody Murder (2000) is the same type of forgettable soap-opera-handsome tall brunette white guy, all dressed in the same drab summer camp t-shirts, all giving the same flat performances, delivering the same Ambien-soaked dialogue. An entire human being received a paycheck to act in this movie I was making a point to carefully scrutinize and I didn't even know he existed.

It can be hard to follow even a good mystery story, to keep track of all the relationships, secrets, and grudges of the best Agatha Christie novel. Bloody Murder (2000) is not a good mystery story. You would think shamelessly aping Friday the 13th (1980) (down to its would-be killer dressing as and sporting a name that matches the cadence of Jason Voorhees) would make for a straight-forward throwback slasher, but Bloody Murder (2000) chases Scream (1996)'s guess-the-killer structure with disastrous results. Kevin Williamson's script for Scream (1996) was a delicate cocktail of plot elements, casting suspicion and doubt without ever losing its relentless momentum. Bloody Murder (2000) is a martini with a teaspoon of gin floating in 7 ounces of olive brine, hard to choke down even at 88 minutes. Where Williamson kept plates spinning with suspicious glances, sinister line readings, a momentary look at a suspect pair of boots, first-time screenwriter John R. Stevenson drowns Bloody Murder (2000) in labyrinthian series of expository rabbit holes that require you to track the names of a dozen identical white people as they poke around in their e-mail and search the web for news articles using the world's #1 search engine USA LYNX SEARCH.

You won't find the typical base pleasures of the slasher genre here; Bloody Murder (2000) was produced for the video market, but keeping an eye on potential television broadcasts it eschews nudity and graphic violence. But there is something admittedly charming about it's clumsy attempts to integrate technology and the internet into the summer camp slasher. Protagonist Julie keeps in touch with her father with hilariously formal nightly emails (email in Bloody Murder (2000) seems to function identically to snail mail, with formal salutations, valedictions, post-scripts, and characters seemingly writing to each other without having yet received the others' emails), dutifully typed out on a deliciously chunky grey laptop, her text echoing in voice-over that sounds like it was recorded in a supply closet, as she pumps him for details about his history at the camp and his connection to the mysterious kook Henry who ominously intones that "Nelson's come back for revenge". The absent father is a red herring out of Scream (1996), Henry is just Crazy Ralph from Friday the 13th (1980), but to set a slasher movie in the wilderness while loading so much plot-critical exposition onto people sitting in front of a Compaq Armada? Only Bloody Murder (2000) is that deranged.

Bloody Murder (2000)'s understanding of human beings is arguably worse than it's understanding of technology and every scene presents a new opportunity to gawk and marvel at the broken way people act. We learn that Jason has held a grudge against Brad for years because they were both competing against each other at a track meet in high school and Jason broke his knee. Brad didn't cause it to happen but Jason takes it personally anyway because Brad didn't quit running track after that, out of solidarity? Every relationship feels like it's sketched by someone for whom interpersonal contact is entirely theoretical, from Drew's intense companionship with Julie (at some point, like a seven year-old, she makes Julie a friendship collage that's so ugly they won't even show it on camera) to Tobe's  flirtations with Julie being a constant stream of skin-crawling sexual harassment followed by "Just kidding, haha, unless...". Tobe isn't the creep who gets killed early on, by the way, he's the film's ultimate male romantic lead. And the camp keeps barreling towards opening day, even after half it's workforce has gone missing and is presumed dead, because the sheriff promises to keep a trooper posted "just down the road". For days at a time? That trooper just lives in his cruiser now, staking out...the entire woods? I mean don't get me wrong, ACAB, but it seems a cruel assignment.

But there is nothing in Bloody Murder (2000) as hilarious as this spontaneous monologue Tobe gives while being questioned by the sheriff about the disappearance of fellow counselor Whitney:

“I can account for his whereabouts at 10 PM and then again at 11:47 PM last night. You see, the VCR we’re using is kind of a piece of shit and- can I say that to a cop? Anyways, I sat next to it in case the film got caught. Dean sat a couple rows behind me. The movie was Sleepover Camp Massaccre 14, the summer camp slasher movie. It has a running time of an hour and 43 minutes. It’s relatively long for movies of the genre. It’s at least possible that Dean could have seen Whitney leave her seat and snuck out the other side of the cabin and followed her into the kitchen. Given that Whitney had to walk over people and around the screen, Dean would have had about 30 seconds on her to reach the kitchen. This would have given him just enough time to get ready for her. It’s about 10:32 now and Whitney enters the kitchen, not seeing anybody there she enters the pantry. Seconds later, while Whitney was searching for something to eat, Dean could have come up behind her in the pantry. At this point it would be 10:35. That’s an hour and seven minutes before the movie ends. This would have given Dean more than enough time to brutally murder Whitney, dispose of the body, clean up the pantry, and return to his seat before the tail credits rolled. But of course that’s just a theory.”

This is in response to the sheriff simply asking "Can you account for Dean's whereabouts at 10:30 PM?" That's all it takes for Tobe to go into a fugue state and turn into Jim Garrison from JFK (1991), spinning up an elaborate theory complete with reenactments. It's like he's a sleeper agent programmed by China to write fan-fiction about his friends murdering each other. His theory is also 100% wrong in every conceivable way. There's not a lot of fun to be had with Bloody Murder (2000); it's usually too dry and lifeless to amuse, even in it's ineptitude. But for about 4 minutes it suddenly becomes the funniest movie ever. That's how it is sometimes: you rent a movie with a chainsaw hockey mask guy on the cover from Blockbuster hoping for a Friday the 13th style bloodbath, but you settle for a sequence so bizarre you'll never forget it.

Bloody Murder (2000) was one of a hundred direct to video slashers released in the 90's and 00's, cynically made by a production team that cut their teeth on low-grade softcore porn, to serve a poster that promised Friday the 13th thrills to a horror audience who hadn't truly enjoyed a Jason movie since Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood (1988). They even wrote a character named Jason into it so the movie could end with him getting killed by their ersatz Jason Voorhees wannabe Trevor Moorehouse, like that scene in the opening of the Jaws (1975) rip-off Orca (1977) where the orca kills the great white shark. It's a cheap and deeply corny move, but apparently it worked as Bloody Murder (2000) found success, a ubiquitous fixture of video store shelves that received a sequel in Bloody Murder 2: Closing Camp (2003). Director/producer Ralph E. Portillo never met a niche audience he wouldn't exploit, whether they were folks looking to masturbate to Cinemax at 3AM (Bare Exposure (1993), Midnight Temptations (1995), Prelude to Love (1995)), undiscerning children pulling crap from the family section of the video store (Big Brother Trouble (2000), The Ghost Club (2003), Undercover Kids (2004)) or Christians who shudder at the thought of secular entertainment (Believers Among Us (2005), Becoming Jesse Tate (2009), Salvation Street (2015)). We slasher fans are no better than any of these other groups. If anything, we're worse because we're pretentious about it. I bet Vinegar Syndrome could sell 2,000 copies of a 4K Bloody Murder double feature tomorrow if it had the right trendy pulp paperback artwork on the limited edition slipcover.

Next time on Silver Screams...Bless the Child (2000)