Pandemonium

at first glance in the tele mag i thought that Pandemonium would be a disappointing film to watch, but i watched it anyway and to my delight it was a well spent hour and a half.

It's a comedy spoof of friday the 13th. there are many refrences to friday the 13th in the film like when they play strip poker and how there are 3 boys and 3 girls, and one teacher.

If you like comedy and you like spoof films this is definitely the film for you. All the characters have their own comedy side to them essential to the nature of the film.

Watch out for appearances by Judge Reinhold and Pee Wee Herman!!!

Odd thing about the post/cover art for this: you'd have no idea it was a horror movie at all, it just looks like a straight comedy. I knew it was a horror spoof, though, and watched it almost back to back with Student Bodies (1981), which I feel was slightly better than this one. This almost feels like it was made for TV.

It starts off with a shot of the moon, and we see the shadow of a wolf baying on the moon's surface, which is revealed to be cast by hands doing shadow puppets, which become hands grabbing a football pass. Four cheerleaders get skewered by a long javelin toss by a mystery killer, so long, the javelin is more like a heat-seeking missile. It makes a shish-ka-bob of them. This is in "It Had to Be, Indiana" at It Had to Be University (It Had to Be U - I like Bullwinkle's Whattsamotta U better).

Years later, a woman reopens the cheerleading school. Each of the new students is introduced by a caption "Victim #1," "#2," etc. Exposition is accompanied by an "Exposition" caption, then "Still More Exposition" etc. A bit weak. Student Bodies relied on captions for humor too.

Isabella Telezynska plays a character spoofing Maria Ouspenskaya's Maleva character from Universal's The Wolf Man, offering a warning in rhyme about pompoms. Carol Kane plays a Carrie-like psychic girl raised by an oppressive mother.

Meanwhile, a driller killer who turns his victims into wood furniture somehow has escaped from prison, and a madman wearing a mask has escaped from an asylum and they hit the road together. The madman's doctor is in pursuit.

Tommy Smothers is the local cop, a Royal Canadian Mountie, for some reason, who has a horse with a circle painted around one eye, and a deputy or servant played by Paul Reubens, doing his Pee Wee Herman voices and laughs, but behaving surly.

The deaths are not quite as odd as in Student Bodies, but there are a lot of them. There are a number of good actors in this movie (like Donald O'Connor and Phil Hartman) who are on screen for so short a time, and given so little to do, often stupid, that they are wasted.

There are some funny lines in the movie, and it is just funny enough not to be a total waste of time.

In the wake of the monumentally successful "Airplane!" came dozens of parody/spoof films in the same vein (or attempting to be in the same vein.) This one has to count as an attempt, and a fairly poor one at that. Someone has been killing cheerleaders for decades near the town of It Had to Be, Indiana. (Thus giving the film makers the opportunity to have a university called It Had to Be U.....) It falls to Smothers, as a Canadian Mountie, to crack the case. Azzara has just begun a cheerleading camp (with participants Candy, Sandy, Mandy, Andy, Randy and Glenn) and, before too long, the killer starts to pick them all off. Also on the loose are a prison escapee and a mental asylum escapee. The plot is deliberately slim (and even then doesn't really make much sense) to make way for the various (mostly horrible) jokes and sight gags. Among the many stabs at humor, only a scant few things emerge as even remotely amusing. What makes the film palatable, if it is at all, is the cast of familiar faces (some quite surprising along the way) and the general amiability of the film. Meant as a spoof of "Friday the 13th" (it was even called "Thursday the 12th" in pre-production), it lacks the graphic violence and vulgarity of that film and its sequels and opts for a kinder, more coy approach. This disappoints fans of the actual slasher movies and is aimed more toward an audience who probably doesn't even really watch such films! Smothers (headlining a feature film in 1982?) doesn't really have a lot to do, but does fit his role well and utilizes his deadpan style admirably. (His horse tends to get more laughs than anybody!) Reubens, as his assistant, basically does an adult extension of his Pee Wee Herman character to middling effect. Most of the high school cheerleaders are (as an in joke to the genre) pushing 30 and they all try to bring a lot of energy and spark to the proceedings, but they have been left out to dry with substandard gags and even more substandard direction. The jokes and potentially humorous visuals are often filmed with minimal creativity and impact. A few amusing things slide through such as a trip to a (really!) greasy spoon diner and a planeload of Japanese (who employ an unexpected and ludicrously funny stewardess.) If one doesn't expect much and gets enjoyment out of intentionally stupid humor (and checking out some stars before and after they were stars), it isn't that hard to get through and is mercifully brief. It pales mightily next to anything Jim Abrahms and the Zucker Brothers did, though. Hunky Hunter, as a football star, shows more animation here than he did during his whole career as a contract actor! Arden looks terrific, but should have skipped this. "Grease" was one thing, but... Many other notable character actors turn up briefly with varied results.

I am a big Judge Reinhold fan, didn't know about this until I did a lookup on his early career for something else.

A person named colleencouch10 had said she couldn't find this in 2013, if she has watches set for her reviews she will find out that this is now watchable as a rental on Amazon Prime and if one looks in Amazon they might be able to get a DVD of it.

Looks good enough as a premise to watch it, normally I'm not into slasher movies or takeoffs of such like Scream, but since I like his work ( see Stripes or Fast Times at Ridgemont High if you really want some great early work of his, Stripes has a recently new directors cut that adds 17 mins but it explains a hell of a lot.

This is the type of movie that one doesn't watch to learn anything or feel any great huge emotions. It's one of those "time-to-kill" films that many people will enjoy, and many others will not. The jokes are not killer, and the script falls a bit flat, but the actors manage to make a good deal of it work. So many stars are in this movie (some not as famous as others), most very good in their roles, but if you are not interested in the big names in the film, then the plot might not hook you, either. All in all, Pandemonium is a movie which could have been better, but succeeds at what it is...a nice little boredom buster with some cute laughs and just enough camp to make this horror parody float.