Summer's End: The Legend of Samhain (2002)

Director: Timothy Whitfield

Screenplay: Timothy Whitfield

Cast: Spring Hill as Jill; Sandra Goff as Sue; Sarah Elizabeth Vernon as Tiffany; Mike DeFrancesco as Det. Morris; Jillian Swanson as Valerie Morris; Timothy Whitfield as Jack / Proff. Richardson; Barry P. Cook as Det, Turner

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) #155

[Major Plot Spoilers Ahead]

 

You're a big dumb male, and I don't like you anymore.

I realise now I am willing to watch any horror film as long as I can at least gain something of note. This is why I am watching certain horror films now more for looking at the locations set in time, then for any of the kill scenes or plot. Even in higher budget examples, it is actually the Blumhouse films which I am wary of, let alone the many bad horror films made by Hollywood studios, because they seem colourless. A film like Summer's End, a micro budget slasher, is indefensible. It is clearly concerned to have a semblance of a story but is more interested in a body count and titillation. Perversely however I have found myself more intrigued by the world of car parks and woodland, that the corridors and rooms being used are more than likely those of people in the production or someone they know.

The pre-credit prologue exemplifies this. Baring a flashback, using turn-of-the-Millennium grain effects in monochrome to look like a double murder taking place in 1957, the main sequence is another in the (then) present day. It is entirely an excuse because the actress cast in the scene was one of two in the film willing to do actual nudity on camera. That sounds crass, but as will be gotten into later in the review, you realise the absurdity of this need in cinema to titillate especially on a micro budget. Especially in micro budget cinema there is also a strangeness to this act for a film's saleability, a weird ritual made more striking especially as you may have limited access to who you can hire, and actresses may not for understandable reason be comfortable in being naked onscreen at said budget. The scene stands out, especially when it is definitely a person's house they are using. Not a set, but someone's homes, including the fact two actors are simulating sex in an outdoor hot tub by the side. It looks like a hot tub some of you, my dear readers, may have bought and may have recreated a similar scene with your significantly other in.

In my own headspace, as a hulking behemoth in an orange Jack O'Lantern mask and the long black hair of a pro wrestler ruins the night by stalking the two, my focus is more on the curious documentary realism finding itself in a genre film due to budgetary restrictions. It is in the little details, that the front door is rigged to chime with bird tweets when opened, or the Cookie Monster jar on top of the fridge. If you have no idea the "Cookie Monster" is from the show Sesame Street, imagine a blue monster jar, sticking out due to its colour in a muted kitchen and an object you might find at an American thrift store. Many horror fans would probably not care or notice; in my position, these little details are now more fascinating then the plot mechanics of a slasher boiled down to their minimum.

This is the case here - the grim Americana that, when serial killers become a concept, then slasher killers could be multiple and ongoing to the day, even when the slasher booms of the eighties and late nineties lost interest, due to the fact you can shot these stories on any budget, even cheaper than a zombie film as you do not even need to try to create the makeup. The only note for the plot is that, even if the killer is from 1957, the plot twist comes from a forties or thirties tale about black magic being used to revenge a petty slight.

What plays out is the template of such films, and thus this review comes as a reminder that cinema is constantly churned out, this an early DVD era production still released on video tape when the mediums once where still co-existent. The basis of a slasher is repeated as in many films before - long scenes of getting to know the cast¹, setting up a party on Halloween night, then the murders - only with resource limitations. One can just ignore a film like this and just cover the classics of the horror canon, but these productions in context are just as fascinating. That, with the final taking place at one building, another person's own home, you do get to see Middle America in 2002 here, how car parks and woodlands are the same but due to the cameras used, and VHS fuzz, everything is lost in time. I find myself now tracking cafes in these films just out of curious amusement, such as a "Cactus Grill", a cafe with stereotypical Hispanic culture murals on the walls, imagining being able to go to the place in real life outside of cinema.

The dialogue is interspliced between another quick murder, and men and women waiting for a drug deal that never has connection to the main plot. Beyond this, the structure is than crude to the best of times, always having been an issue with higher budgeted slasher films let alone one at this budget. Like pornography, you can hit the required beats for your targeted audience, and make a film like this in your back garden. The problem arises is that it is so easy to be mechanical as a result, repeating over and over lacking inspiration. The slashers that have won me over were never for their kills or bared breasts, but for their quirks and personality.

Summer's End has the kills - a far more lurid take on the shower scene from Psycho (1960), which it name checks earlier in dialogue, and a decapitation by window. As for the titillation, never does something like a micro budget reveal the dichotomy between reality (that people change clothes and bathe) and the surplus requirement for female eroticism for a heterosexual male audience. It is not even the two actresses who do commit to full nudity that raises this, but when the production still wants to do so but with the actresses who clearly declined to. It feels so much more prurient when there is a scene of an actress here in merely her underwear for a long period of time, or a shower scene that is unnecessary, which has to cut to the camera at a height close to not show anything under the shoulders.  These actresses are in their right to decline nudity, and you instead ask why the production kept the scenes in, as the only notable thing for me in one vary striking costume choice, of the garish but boldest sort, of a deep orange top with a flower embroidered in the breast bone, matched by skimpy golden briefs as an abrupt colour choice for the moment.

Why diehard slasher fans would despise someone like me is because I am far more distracted by a Cookie Monster jar or this, I find this more compelling. Likewise, I have to wonder about a male writer writing the dialogue for a mostly female cast in a film like this more than a serious drama. I speak of this not from the "woke" attitude of feminism, but from the logic that, if one works in genre cinema and has to write a diverse cast, you would think one should fully engage with depicting someone totally unlike oneself, only to also realise that, considering how much cinema is churned out especially films like this by the digital camera era, this thought has probably not been considered as much.

Here these characters could have been worse, though no one is memorable. To paraphrase one character too, the male characters are "horny little bastards", leading to another odd touch to slasher films in how the male characters are usually depicted, which is a curious gendered aspect to these slasher films not talked about more. They act like goofballs jumping their girlfriends in the dark wearing masks to scare them or adolescent boys obsessed with sex, as is the case here. The only beefcake is one guy in his boxers scratching his nuts, about to have children's cereal, and I have to ask one question. Are these men meant to be likable or to be mocked? What does it say about the slasher genre, which has been criticised for its male gaze, until audiences including queer and feminist readings stepped in, that the stand-ins for the original target male audiences, back in the eighties when the boom first kicked off, were like this too, a lot of mildly cretinous male figures among the idealised female cast?

These are the many things that come to mind with watching films like this. Quality and whether a film like Summer's End being good in the traditional sense no longer appeals to me to write and think about. Instead, it is looking at details like this. To the film's credit, it takes a risk by having the villains win, ending moodily in a wintery backyard after a massacre has transpired. But this curiosity of micro-budgeted cinema does more as it exposed the slasher's inherent absurdity and quirks that continue all over them over the years. These things fascinate me so much.

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1) The version I saw was a beat up copy with sound through one headset, so sadly dialogue was difficult to catch.