Canuxploitation: Canadian Slashers!

The slasher boom of the 80s had a huge impact, including a huge influence on our neighbors to the north Here are 7 classic slashers that came out of the Canuxploitation boom.

My Bloody Valentine (1981): A lot of Canuxploitation movies try to hide how Canadian they are, but this movie lets it's Canadian-ness shine. It's shot in Nova Scotia, set in a rural coal mining town and all the actors sport pretty thick accents; it's very Canadian. But it's also a really fun slasher flick featuring a killer equipped with a gas mask and pick axe! When it was originally released, the MPAA cut approximately 5-9 min out of the film to get it to an R rating cutting all of the kills out. Thankfully the gore bits were reassembled for a release in 2009, with only one kill still missing due to the deterioration of that section of film. (My Bloody Valentine also features a closing song that will defiantly stick with you for while...)

Prom Night (1980): This is a cheap cash in on the success of Halloween, so much so that they got Jamie Lee Curtis to star in it! This one always felt pretty forgettable and boring to us, but honestly we've only seen it a couple times on a really bad VHS copy so maybe there's more to it that we're missing. Though, it does feature a ridiculous disco soundtrack that prompted a number of critics to dub this a cross between Halloween and Saturday Night Fever!

Terror Train: Another Jamie Lee Curtis movie! This one gets a lot less love than Prom Night, but we feel this one's superior in many ways (you can check out our previous gushings about it here). This one's shot by John Alcott (long time Kubrick Cinematographer) so the movie looks amazing and is surprisingly flush with creative lighting and camera work. It's all shot on a train, which could get dull pretty quick, but the filmmakers incorporate stuff like unique masks used by the killer, Vanity in a leading role, and an on-train magic act preformed by none other than a young David Copperfield, so there's hardly a dull moment! Scream Factory put Terror Train out on Blu-ray, it's well worth picking up to see this flick in all it's glory.

Curtains: This unique slasher revolves around a movie director (played by John Vernon) who convinces his long-time leading lady that, in order to properly research her next role, she must be briefly (and covertly) committed to an asylum. However, his actual intentions are to just leaver her there forever. While she's desperately trying to escape the asylum, he holds additions for new lead actresses at his secluded estate, where masked killer picks them off one by one. This is a really interesting movie, but it's also a disjointed mess, and it's likely because of all the production problems. The crew shot 45 min of film before production stopped for a rewrite, and they didn't resume filming for over a year. The director, Richard Ciupka, wanted to make an art-house horror film, but producer Peter Simpson (who produced all 4 original Prom Night movies) wanted a more "marketable" film. Ciupka left the project when production shutdown, had his name removed from the film, and insisted the director credit go to the fictional director in the film, Jonathan Stryker.

Happy Birthday to Me: A pretty straightforward mystery-slasher, but also a really fun one! That's likely due to the fact that it was made by the veteran director J. Lee Thompson. Though, Thompson had never directed a straightforward horror movie before, he had directed multiple Planet of the Apes films as well as the original Cape Fear. After filming this horror gem he directed a bunch of Charles Bronson movies for Cannon films, but we're glad he took a stab a the horror genre when he did!

Black Christmas: Made four years before the original Halloween, this horror classic spawned countless holiday slasher films. This film also came almost a decade before director Bob Clark made his other holiday staple: A Christmas Story. This classic also features a star (and going to be star) studded cast: Margot Kidder, Olivia Hussey, Andrea Martin, Keir Dullea, and John Saxon just to name a few! This is also the first feature film to use the "calls are coming from inside the house" trope, and one of the first to use POV shots from the perspective of the killer to obscure their identity from the audience. We could go on and on about this one, it's one of our faves inside and out!

Mindless Action: Gone Wrong

Mindless action isn't necessarily devoid of plot or proper character motivation, because when you leave too many elements of a movie neglected, seriously bad things can happen...

A Good Day to Die Hard: You shouldn't be shocked to learn the fifth installment in the Die Hard series is the worst, but we never recommended anyone watch this movie. Even when people say "oh we'll watch it anyway, just to see how bad it is" we say: don't bother. The worst parts of this film are the back and fourth between McClane and his son, and 50% of that is them relentlessly yelling each other's names. (Actually, the worst parts of this movie might be the needless, unaddressed, and seemingly endless slaughter of innocent civilians, but it's hard to focus on those parts with all the "JOHN!" and "JACK!"ing.)

The Glove: Look at that poster, read that tagline! What could possibly be bad about this movie? Oh only that it's one of the most BORING movies we've ever watched in mixed company. Our buddy picked this out of a stack a few years ago and he's still not lived it down entirely. The titular glove shows up like it was shot long after the main film, it never really fits into the larger story and takes up almost no screen time! Also the main detective (played by John Saxon) is a lousy drunk who's terrible at his job and refuses to pay his child support. A better tagline for this movie would be "an asshole detective tries to solve a humdrum crime while we wait for an amazing robo-glove to save the day that almost doesn't show up". 

Chappie: Oh how we wanted to like Chappie, but not only were the character motivations questionable throughout, this film location hopped more than The Stuff and for arguably flimsier reasons. One moment the hero is at Die Antwoord's hideout, the next he's run back to his office only to run right back to the hideout. It's a mess. And we were extra disappointed because this was a forgettable mess, rather than a fun mess.

Mitchell: I can't imagine watching this movie without the Mystery Science Theater 3000 crew relentlessly mocking it. We've never tried, but thinking about it makes me uncomfortable. There's the world's longest, slowest and least action-packed car chase ever committed to film, the most skin crawling "sex" scenes, and it took me far too many viewings to actually understand the plot of the thing. And don't even get me started on the hero's theme song! But, as unbearable as it might be on it's own, it will always be one of our top five MST3Ks.

Prototype X29A: This movie was on our to-watch pile for months before someone finally picked it. Everyone was convinced the phrase "psychosexual dreams" on the box was going to make it a winner for better or worse. But when we actually tried to watch it, it was a SNOOZE fest. One of our friends fell asleep early on only to wake up at the end demanding to know why everything was blowing up, sadly we had no answers for her and we were paying attention!



Bonus movie:

Doctor Justice: To be fair, we did not finish this movie. Maybe someday we'll give it another shot, I mean look at that cover art, action happens at some point! But the 45 mins we made it through was another snooze fest. Seriously though, John Phillip Law, Paul Naschy, and Gert Frobe? How on earth did it end up so dull?!