Saturday Scream Queen: Shannon Elizabeth

Shannon Elizabeth is a model turned actress--a common career path for Scream Queens. Her first professional acting jobs were bit parts on television, but her first major role was in "Jack Frost" where her character was killed off in what will surely forever be a unique scene in film history: She was raped to death by a killer snowman.

Although best known for her role as Nadia in the first two "American Pie" films, Elizabeth's resume is peppered with horror flicks, including the horror spoof "Scary Movie", remakes "13 Ghosts" and "Night of the Demons" and retro-chillers "You Belong to Me" and "Cursed."

'Night of the Demons' has Halloween gore

Night of the Demons (2010)
Starring: Diora Baird, Shannon Elizabeth, Edward Furlong, Monica Keena, Bobbi Sue Luther, John F. Beach, Michael Copon, and Tiffany Shepis
Director: Adam Gierash
Stars: Five of Ten Stars

After an illicit rave in a mansion that was the sight of mysterious disappearances and murder on Halloween night some 90 years ago, the party organizer (Elizabeth) and six friends accidentally discover what happened. In doing so, they awaken demons that have until dawn to possess and destroy seven humans in order escape their prison inside the house.

"Night of the Demons" is a remake of the 1988 horror fan-favorite of the same title. It sat on a shelf at the studio for a year before being released directly to DVD, has a more satisfying ending than the 1988 original (and, in an amusing way, manages to present one of those "final moment twists" I so often rail about that actually works), but other than that it doesn't measure up.

There is only one scene that's as scary and strange as anything in the 1988 film--involving lipstick and about a gallon of blood--but everything else is what we've come to expect from a movie about beautiful young people trapped in a house with demons that possess them and pick them off, one by one. The film has the further flaw that the characters aren't actually trapped, but appear merely to be too dumb to scale the wall around the mansion's grounds; the gate is mysteriously locked, but what's to stop them from giving one of their number a boost over the wall so that person can get a locksmith?

"Night of the Demons" is a fast paced, competently made but unspectacular horror flick. The stars all deliver good performances, it's got just enough story and character development to keep me happy, and its spiced up with plenty of gore and jiggling naked boobs to make me even happier. Perhaps if such a clear line hadn't been drawn to the 1988 title (if it had been called "House of Demons" or "Seven Until Dawn" or some-such), I would have considered it to be among the better paint-by-number horror flicks out there. As it is, however, it suffers by the comparisons it invites and therefore calls attention to the fact that it really does fall at the bottom end of average.

'Cursed' is a fine mix of old and new horror sensibilities

Cursed (2007)
Starring: Christina Ricci, Jesse Eisenberg, Mya, Joshua Jackson, Shannon Elizabeth, Portia de Rossi, and Christina Anapau
Director: Wes Craven
Steve's Rating: Eight of Ten Stars

Christina Ricci stars as a young TV producer who finds her inner beast unleashed after she and her brother are bit by a werewolf. Put "Cursed" next to also-rans like "Boogeyman" and "The Grudge," and it's more clear than ever that Wes Craven remains the king of horror flicks featuring Beautiful People Vs. The Monsters.



"Cursed" is at once a by-the-numbers werewolf flick (complete with pure-hearted victims trying to fight the curse and a storyline that invites the viewers to guess which of the supporting characters is the monster) and a clever, engaging film that keeps the viewers guessing right up to the end. The film is full of elements so well used they've become cliches, but it embraces them in a way that's both respectful of all the films that have gone before and light-hearted. "Cursed" moves from suspenseful, to funny, to scary with ease, and folks who enjoy good horror movies will love this one.

(I spend a lot of time railing against films that don't bring anything new to their genres, but "Cursed" puts all the old elements together is such a graceful and fun fashion that I can't mount any complaints. Craven clearly knew he was making a cliched movie, and he took full advantage of that fact. If more directors and script writers would take that approach, maybe their retreads would come together more effectively.)

The Jack Frost Duology

It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas, so there's no better time to review the Jack Frost movies...

In brief "Jack Frost" is a watchable (if cheesy and goofy) monster flick, but "Jack Frost 2" isn't worth the effort it takes to open the DVD case.


Jack Frost (1995)
Starring: Christopher Allport
Director: Michael Cooney
Rating: Five of Ten Stars

A mass-murdering homicidal maniac named Jack is killed in a freak accident as he is being transported from one prison to another. The freakiest part of the freak accident is that he is resurrected as a snowman. A mass-murdering homicidal maniac snowman. With superpowers. And a carrot for a nose. Naturally, he sets about getting revenge on the small-town sheriff who captured him (Allport), but happily kills anyone else who crosses his path.

There isn't much else to say about "Jack Frost" than what I did above. As low-budget horror flicks go, it's not terrible... it's not great, but it's not terrible. The acting is fair all around, the effects are decent, and if you can buy into a murderous snowman wih the power to control snow and ice and use it as weapons, then I guess it's an okay monster movie. The kills are also bloody enough to please gorehounds, I think. (It might have been better if the snowcover had been more consistent in the various shots and a little less fake in many of them.)

I think the greatest flaw the movie has is that I got the sense the filmmakers believed they had their hands on a character around which a franchise could be built, ala Freddy Krueger and "A Nightmare on Elm Street", and I think this led them to play the film far straighter than the concept deserves.

One thing I think will probably make "Jack Frost" stand forever alone in the annals of film history is the snowman bathtub rape scene. I don't think that's ever been done before, and I don't think it will ever be done again. (I know some find that scene laughable, but I found it pretty horrific. I'm not saying it wasn't goofy as hell, but that entire sequence creeped me out more than anything else in the film. Heck, it was the ONLY thing that creeped me out. And ending the scene featuring a girl being raped to death by a snowman with the line "Looks like Christmas came a bit early this year" makes it all the more sickening.)




Jack Frost 2: Revenge of the Killer Mutant Snowman (2000)
Starring: Christopher Allport and Eileen Sheely
Director: Michael Cooney
Rating: Two of Ten Stars

Sam, our Hero from the original "Jack Frost" movie (once again played by Chistopher Allport), decides to spend Christmas someplace warm the year following the Attack of the Killer Snowman. Unfortunately, Jack (after escaping from what appeared to be certain doom at the end of the last flick) follows him across the ocean and starts cutting Christmas (and life) short for vacationers at a Caribbean resort.

Remember how I said above that I thought the makers of "Jack Frost" should just have gone for a full-bore comedic spin on their subject? Well, they did that with the sequel. It's too bad they had a collection of bad actors, no effects budget (or any other kind of budget, based on the sets), and a script so bad that I have to believe it was being made up as shooting was progressing. (I know what passes for the "big special effects scenes" in the film had to be planned, but I really hope that the rest of the unfunny crap that makes up the bulk of this awful film didn't even go through one draft. It had to have been spewed straight from a keyboard into the hands of the movie crew.) I probably should have known that I'd regret wasting part of my life on this turd when I realized the killer snowman was menacing people on a tropical island.

I think the only nice thing I can say about "Revenge of the Killer Mutant Snowman" is that it is fast-paced; although I think my IQ dropped another point with each lame gag, I never did get bored. But that doesn't mean that what I watched was good. There is really only one scene that I thought was worthwhile in this entire film... and it's the one where Jack breaks himself into ice cubes and sneaks into a cooler of a photographer and his nubile models. It ends with the niftiest murder in the entire feature.


The bottomline on both these flicks is that they represent mostly missed opportunities. The first fails at being a good horror/comedy fusion, and the second just fails.

(Trivia: Christopher Allport was killed in a skiing accident in 2008.)