Fred Olen Ray

  • Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers (1988)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, August 2021) I usually despise gore-centric horror — I’m not a fan of violence in the first place, and gore movies often put a nihilistic disregard for humans (bolstered by special effects and makeup tricks) well ahead of any traditional cinematic value. This goes double for gore-centric horror/comedies, which come across as psychopathic if they fail to build the delicate equilibrium of balancing the exposed innards with the self-aware comedy. In this context, Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers is almost remarkable for being almost likable despite featuring prostitutes gleefully dismembering their clients with chainsaws. Coming from B-movie authority Fred Olen Ray, it’s incredibly cheap and tasteless: the sets barely meet high school theatrical production standards and the actors were probably hired in seedy offices with entrances on Los Angeles’ back alleys. The plot is an absurdly lurid tale of an Egyptian-worshipping cult sacrificing victims to Anubis, with a Private Eye narrating his efforts to get to the bottom of a killing spree. Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers clearly doesn’t take itself seriously from its amusing opening disclaimer onward, as the over-the-top narration is contracted at every turn by the sequences we see, and the special “gore” effects are so terrible that they just add to the comedy. Blood sprays like red-coloured water, clunky one-liners pepper the narration and dialogue, and the women disrobe on a predictable basis… but then wield their chainsaws with a big grin. The gore component is almost completely defused by the broad comedy, and then the noir/cult plotting takes over and the film’s 75 minutes are over before we can even dare question what we’ve just seen. If you’re looking for interesting cheap low-budget films in the comedy/horror arena, Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers should be somewhere on your list (albeit nearer the bottom): it’s far from respectable, and that’s probably the best thing about it.

  • Evil Toons (1992)

    Evil Toons (1992)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, on Cable TV, February 2019) There’s some really weird stuff if you start looking in the late-night lineup of your Cable TV channels, and I was really amused to find Evil Toons on the schedule of French-Canadian horror-focused Frisson TV. It’s not exactly a well-known film. It’s not a good movie. It even stretches the definition of a “fun to watch” film. But it’s certainly weird enough to warrant a look. The premise is one that I find immensely charming, being about a few young women asked to clean a house that—obviously!—turns out to be haunted, possessed and just plain old evil. David Carradine shows up to looks spooky and deliver some exposition, but he’s not the main draw here. That would turn out to be pornographic actress Madison Stone in a relatively rare mainstream role, first as a funny sex kitten and then as a threatening vamp. The weirdness doesn’t stop there, as the antagonists of the film are realized as hand-drawn cartoons integrated in the live-action footage. Writer/director Fred Olen Ray has a checkered career in low-budget films (most of his movies don’t even have a Wikipedia page), but I’m sure that Evil Toons represents a career high of sort. Now, I wouldn’t want to overhype this—Evil Toon’s potential vastly exceeds what it ends up delivering. We barely scratch the surface of the naughty horror comedy that it could have been in better hands. Budget oblige, the toons barely show up … and the script can’t even be bothered with a few choice pieces of dialogue that even a marginally better comedy would have delivered without breaking a sweat. There’s no subtlety, the story’s development is lame and the characters have a tendency to under-react to sights that would have more realistic (heck, most comic) characters screaming their heads off—how dumb are these people? The end-credit music is catchy, though, and Evil Toons manages to go without nudity for a full twenty minutes. What we’re left with is still a weird movie, albeit with Madison Stone doing her best. It could have been quite a bit better but somehow, I can’t bring myself to condemn the result.