Homicidal

I have a longer intro than normal here, so I hope you'll indulge me. It does pay off. It's been said that the original Friday The 13th is a shameless copy of the original Halloween. This isn't opinion; this was said by its creators. When Sean Cunningham commissioned a script from Victor Miller, he told Miller to watch Halloween and copy it. But if you watch the two movies, they share almost no similarities. Halloween is set in the suburban area of a small town; Friday is set deep in the isolation of the woods, miles from the nearest town. Halloween's horror comes from slow-building dread and the idea of random death coming into your home; Friday's horror is visceral, more like a roller coaster. Halloween's killer is known from the start, and is a remorseless, passionless agent of death; Friday's killer is a mystery until the very end, very much has a motive, and revels in making the kills as painful and punishing as possible. Halloween almost avoids gore, letting the end of young life itself be the horrific aspect of its killer's rampage; Friday has blood spurting and mutilations and decapitations, the horror coming from the gruesome nature of the kill. Other than being early successes in the slasher sub-genre of horror, they have, structurally, thematically, visually, and in almost any other aspect you can think of, almost nothing in common. Friday The 13th stands as a perfect example of how to do a "rip-off" right; taking inspiration and the basic formula, but using altogether new ingredients and focusing on new aspects to present a movie that looks and feels different from its roots. Which brings us to the unfortunate case of Homicidal, William Castle's B-movie, half-hearted remix of Psycho. I recently watched Castle's Strait-Jacket, and while I did like it more, I wasn't thrilled with the script's psychological aspects being at war with Castle's more base-level, shock-value horror tendencies. I wanted one or the other, because the marriage between the two made for an unbalanced result. Homicidal isn't bogged down by Strait-Jacket's more cerebral tendencies. It is open and honest about being campy, over the top, and trying to hit that lizard-brain reaction. The problem is what I discussed in the intro: how to successfully do a rip-off. Friday isn't content with taking the aspects of Halloween and turning the dial up to 11. New setting, bigger cast, the murderer is unknown, and so on. Friday takes the Lego set Halloween uses to build a whole different structure. Homicidal doesn't do that. It takes the road that, say, Body Of Evidence did with its ripping off of Basic Instinct; just turn up the dial. More violence and make it more graphic. Reduce the subtle shading of the main character's psychosis to the most primary colors. It doesn't feel like Psycho's cheaper, more tawdry remake, it feels like Psycho For Dummies. And before anybody comments with "were you expecting it to be as good as Psycho?", no, I was not. That's not the issue. The issue is that Castle didn't do anything new. Homicidal's relationship to Psycho is less like Friday/Halloween and more like The Mutilator is to Friday The 13th; a cash-grab copy that does the bare minimum to be legally distinct in copyright court. Does that make Homicidal a bad movie? No, it is twisty and turny enough to keep your attention, and lead Joan Marshall is allowed to go delightfully buck wild with her performance as Emily. She (and she alone) keeps this movie from falling in on itself and becoming unwatchable, but only just barely. Because the other problem plaguing Homicidal is one it couldn't control; the movie is entirely reliant on shock factor. It was literally part of the movie's marketing, wherein there is a 45 second "fright break" right before the climax for anybody too scared to see it through to the end. Psycho maintains its relevance by being a well-made movie with amazing performances that slowly builds tension until the explosion of madness at the end. Homicidal is all campy over-acting and a rather bland climax that caps off a movie that feels needlessly convoluted. The world has moved on in the past sixty years. Hell, one could make the case that Homicidal was dated by the end of the 60s. And that leaves Homicidal as little more than a curiosity; passable for camp value, but judged on its merits, unable -- unwilling, even -- to do anything to make itself more than a faded copy of something better.