The Final Sacrifice (1990)

Film school is an interesting place.  You get a small amount of money to make as big a film as you can.  It’s basically micro-budgets.  The only thing is that film school normally involves making short films, and with that experience, you can move your way into the bigger budget, longer length feature films that you want to work on.  Those longer movies will take more money to produce because, obviously, they take longer to make.

That’s not always the case, though.  There are some films that get to be an hour or an hour and a half and have budgets comparable to those of the short length student films.  A whole subculture has bloomed out of micro-budget film.  Movies get made for under $5000 all the time that are feature length.  Most of them don’t get seen beyond the people who made them, and their friends.  They tend to rot in someone’s basement.  Some of them get shared around and their audiences grow.  Some of them explode.  Most go nowhere.

The Final Sacrifice, also known as Quest for the Lost City, was one of the films that garnered an audience.  Most of that was due to Mystery Science Theater 3000 featuring it in a 1998 episode, but still.  An audience is an audience.  The story was about Troy McGreggor (Christian Malcolm), a young man being hunted by an evil cult.  He teamed up with Zap Rowsdower (Bruce J. Mitchell), a former member of the cult, to take down the people hunting him and restore an ancient city to its former glory.

Movies with low budgets sometimes have a tough time getting made.  Films cost money and when there isn’t much money to go around, that budget can be blown quite easily.  The Final Sacrifice was made for approximately $1500 Canadian in 1990.  Factoring inflation into the picture, that would be about $2500 today.  That’s still not a lot of money.

One lesson I learned in my first year at film school was the concept of “beg, borrow, and steal.”  It might sound a slight bit illegal with that last part.  The idea behind it was meant to make everyone think creatively on where to get the supplies needed for productions.  Beg people to give you things that you need.  If that doesn’t work, beg some more.  Convince them to let you use what they have.  Borrow things from people that you know will lend them to you.  If your uncle has an uninstalled bathtub laying around and you need one for your set, ask if you can borrow it for the production and return it after.  The stealing is slightly more questionable.  It didn’t mean that people can go into stores and take whatever they want without paying.  Don’t ever do that.  That’s shoplifting and is a bad thing that could get you in some major trouble.  But say you’re driving past a house where the fence was blown down and the people decided that instead of reinstalling it, they would throw it out.  Take it from their curb.  Who is going to miss that fence?  They were getting rid of it anyway.

Tjardus Greidanus definitely utilized the “beg, borrow, and steal” method while making The Final Sacrifice.  For one thing, the camera equipment that was used was borrowed from the school he attended, the Southern Alberta Institute of Technology.  That cut down a good portion of the budget, as the crew didn’t have to pay for the equipment they were using.  Christian Malcolm, who co-wrote the script and starred in the movie, was another student at the Southern Alberta Institute of Technology.  This meant that he probably didn’t have to be paid for any of the work he did on the project.  The locations were likely a variety of homes owned by the people working on the film, abandoned buildings, and secluded unpopulated outdoor areas where permits didn’t cost money.  With such a low budget, the money couldn’t be thrown away to secure locations that had to be paid for.

Using the “beg, borrow, and steal” mentality, The Final Sacrifice was probably able to write off much of the normal production costs that more professional films have.  This was a student film, remember.  Most of the budget would have been eaten up by the food that was necessary for the cast and crew.  If the movie was done anywhere near normal film standards, that is.  If it wasn’t, then the money could have gone anywhere.  Low budget films are hard to judge like that.  There can be assumptions made about the breakdown of the budget, but without having been there, it’s difficult to tell where it went.  Perhaps it was all used for the special effects and sound effects.  Guns, car crashes, that sort of stuff.  It would all cost money and $1,500 doesn’t go to far.

Low budget filmmaking can be tough.  It can be difficult to get the resources required to make the film you want to make.  This is especially true the longer the film ends up being.  A $1,500 budget in the early 1990s was a small amount of money to make a short film, let alone the feature length picture that The Final Sacrifice was.  The crew should be commended for how well they used that budget and how the film that came out of it wasn’t all that bad.  It wasn’t the pinnacle of high art or anything.  The Final Sacrifice was an entertaining, messy movie.  But it got made, and it wasn’t hard to follow the story.  It was a fun watch.  Tjardus Greidanus did a good job getting his team to make it.

Now let’s get some notes in here:

• The Final Sacrifice was suggested to me by @allflicker.
• Have you seen The Final Sacrifice?  What did you think about it?  Was it entertaining, or dull?  Is Zap Rowsdower and awesome name?  Let me know your thoughts in the comments.
• Do you have any suggestions for movies I should be checking out?  Tell me about them on Twitter or in the comments.  I’m always up for some movies I might not know about.
• Sometimes when I watch bad movies, I share bits and pieces of them on my Snapchat.  If that interests you in any way, add me (jurassicgriffin).
• The post for the week after this one is for a movie called Road to Revenge.  That post is also a little late.  Bear with me here while I get caught up.  Thanks, and again, sorry for being late on three of the posts.

New Year's Evil (1980)

Halloween came out in 1978 and took the horror world by storm.  It was an independent slasher film making big bucks thanks to the direction of John Carpenter, the acting of Jamie Lee Curtis, and the spookiness of Michael Myers.  Audiences took notice and went out to see it.  Studios also took notice, and decided to make their own slasher movies in order to make some of the big bucks that Halloween was raking in.

1980 was a pretty big year for the slashers made to capitalize on the success of Halloween.  Prom Night came out, bringing the horror to the biggest night of dance that high school has to offer.  Friday the 13^th came out, which didn’t yet feature Jason as the killer but used one of the unluckiest days to kill off a bunch of camp counselors.  Christmas Evil made the holiday cheer into holiday fear.  Then there was New Year’s Evil, which rounded out the year with some murder.

New Year’s Evil took place on New Year’s Eve.  Diane Sullivan (Roz Kelly), known by the nickname Blaze, was hosting a punk New Year’s concert that was broadcast on television.  A mysterious caller called into the show and said they were going to murder someone at midnight.  When midnight Eastern Standard Time came around, the caller followed through on their promise and committed a murder.  The murders were going to happen every hour on the hour as the different American time zones entered the new year.

The idea behind New Year’s Evil was pretty good.  It wasn’t a simple case of people getting killed for the sake of being killed.  There was a modus operandi to what was going on.  Many of the slasher movies that came out as a result of Halloween’s success had the murders happening on a specific day.  This one fit with that too.  But there was the added detail that it would be happening every hour on the hour.  The killer was much more deliberate in that way, which raised the stakes because there were multiple ticking clocks as the night went on.  It helped to make everything tenser.

There were a few things that separated New Year’s Evil from many of the slasher movies of the time.  The most notable was the identity of the killer.  The vast majority of slasher flicks hide the face of the killer until the end of the movie, if they show it at all.  The Scream movies were all about trying to figure out who the murderer was.  The Friday the 13^th movies and the Halloween movies let the audience know who the killer was, but hid their faces behind masks.  If a slasher movie shows the killer’s face throughout the movie, like in A Nightmare on Elm Street, there tends to be a disfiguration to their face that will set them apart from the average person.  New Year’s Evil took a different approach.

Early in the movie, the killer was revealed.  The audience wasn’t let in on exactly who they were or why they were doing what they were doing, but their face was all over the movie.  The killer was a master of disguise, going from one look to another.  They were shown changing disguises between each of the murders they committed.  There was never any doubt about which person the killer was or what they looked like at any given moment.  It was their full identity that was hidden until closer to the end of the movie.  That set New Year’s Evil apart from most of the other slasher movies of the time.

Another thing that set New Year’s Evil apart from other slasher movies was the use of music.  Most slashers up to that point relied on their score to accentuate what was going on.  That was there as well.  The thing is, New Year’s Evil also used punk music to give everything a certain feel.  Having not seen every slasher movie, it’s hard to say for sure, but it seems like this might have been one of the earliest examples of a non-score soundtrack being an important part of a slasher movie.  The Friday the 13^th movies would use some lyrical music by the time they reached their fourth installment, and A Nightmare on Elm Street had Dokken making a theme song for the third installment, but New Year’s Evil was doing that years before either of those franchises.

The music was an integral part of New Year’s Evil.  There was, of course, the New Year’s Eve punk concert that was being broadcast.  It was this show that the killer called into.  It was the host of the show who was ostensibly the protagonist, though the killer was the person followed through most of the runtime.  The concert was an important part of the story.  The punk soundtrack also gave a sort of anti-authority vibe that fit with the killer snapping and going on a spree.  The songs fit with the host’s son having his own breakdown.  And the punk aesthetic was a good contrast to the police authority types who were on the scene to keep the killer from going after Blaze.  Punk might have only been used because it was the late 1970s when the film was made and they wanted to capitalize both on the holiday horror and punk crazes, but it mixed well with the horror to make a fun little film.

New Year’s Evil was the result of a few entertainment elements, made to earn money off of what the filmmakers thought were the fads of the time.  Luckily for the people who enjoyed them, punk and slasher flicks weren’t a fad.  They were long-lasting parts of the entertainment landscape that would survive the test of time.  New Year’s Evil was a part of both, and an enjoyable one at that.  The kills were fun, the music was memorable, and the story gave some twists and turns that were refreshing though predictable.  For something that was a resultant production, it ended up being a pretty good one.

Now there are a few notes before you head off for the week:

• This post mentioned Halloween.  I’ve watched one Halloween movie for the Sunday “Bad” Movies, and it was Halloween 6: The Curse of Michael Myers (week 48).
• Friday the 13^th was also mentioned.  Three movies from that series have been featured.  They were Friday the 13th Part V: A New Beginning (week 46), Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan (week 294), and Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday (week 85).
• Richard Brown was in New Year's Evil, returning to the Sunday "Bad" Movies after appearing in Glitter (week 22).
• Have you seen New Year’s Evil?  What did you think about it?  Was it good or bad or somewhere in between?  Let me know in the comments.
• The comments or Twitter are good places to suggest movies that I should be watching for the Sunday “Bad” Movies.  Tell me about any movies you think would fit.
• Sometimes when I watch bad movies, I’ll share clips of them on Snapchat (jurassicgriffin).  Add me if you want.
• Next week, I’ll be checking out a sequel to some movies that I’ve seen for the blog before.  I know there’s at least one person who reads the blog who has been looking forward to this one.  The time has come.  God’s Not Dead 3: A Light in the Darkness will be featured next week, so I’ll see you all then, once I’ve had this spiritual quest.

Holiday Spin (2012) and How It is Like Another Film

Every year, as things are wrapping up, we enter the Christmas holiday season.  Hanukkah happens.  Then Christmas.  Kwanzaa quickly after that.  Festivus is in there somewhere too (it’s tonight, in fact).  All these holidays get crammed into December.  With them come the holiday music.  Television shows air their Christmas episodes then go on their winter break.  And movies get Christmassy too.  Not all the movies, but a good number of them.

Looking in the theaters, you might not notice a big spike in holiday fare.  There was, what, The Grinch this year?  That’s about it.  It’s on the small screen that many of the holiday movies end up coming out.  Most notably, Lifetime and Hallmark become filled with holiday movies throughout December and much of the latter half of November.  Most of them involve a man falling in love with a woman.  One of people had a job that was the focus of their life.  Then they met the other one who changed them with the holiday feelings and their romance took over, making them both better people.  That’s most of the movies.

Sometimes, though, within that basic heterosexual romance storyline that they so often employ, they use other story beats to tell their tales.  The framing or structure of the movie might be playing off a different, more well-known movie.  Take 2012’s Holiday Spin, for example.  It was basically a made-for-television version of a Step Up movie.  A guy fell in love with a girl through dancing with her.  Getting into more specific territory, it felt like Step Up 3D in terms of story.

The place to start would be to lay out the storylines of each movie.  Holiday Spin was about Blake (Garrett Clayton), a teenager from Carolina who wanted to be an MMA fighter.  On the eve of a big fight that could rocket him to stardom, he got in a car accident.  His mother died in the car accident, and he was forced to go live with his estranged father Ruben (Ralph Macchio) until he turned eighteen.  While staying with his father, Blake fell in love with a dancer named Pia (Allie Bertram).  They connected through dance and became a pair of top competitors in the Holiday Spin contest.

Step Up 3D told two stories.  One was about Moose (Adam G. Sevani), an engineering student with a background in dance.  He was being lured out of his student lifestyle and back into the dance world by a group of street dancers.  The dancers were trying to raise enough money to keep their dance studio/hangout afloat.  Meanwhile, the leader of the dance crew, Luke (Rick Malambri), was an aspiring filmmaker who wanted to use film to showcase the dance talent he knew.  He fell in love with Natalie (Sharni Vinson), and their relationship bloomed throughout the film.

If you just read all of that, you might be wondering why I’m so hung up on the two movies being similar.  They’re both dance movies.  Dance movies tend to have the same kinds of stories.  People dance.  People fall in love.  That’s a dance movie for you.  That’s not it though.  Some of the more specific similarities have already come through in the synopses.  Some of the other ones were left out of the synopses and will be highlighted soon.

The storyline about the main character striving to do one thing while being brought back into dance was the most apparent similarity between the two films.  Holiday Spin had Blake training to be an MMA fighter and being brought back into the dance he had been raised on.  His mom was a dancer.  His dad was a dancer.  As a child, he had been a championship dancer.  When he was bullied at school for his dancing abilities, he shifted gears to become an MMA fighter.  That way, he could fight back against the people that bullied him.  Moose, from Step Up 3D, was an engineering student.  Before diving into engineering, he had been a dancer at an arts school that was featured in the first two films of the series.  He met a guy running a dance crew, and that guy convinced him to dive back into dancing.  Both Blake and Moose became the key figures in their dance teams, bringing glory when all seemed lost.

This brings everything to the second common element.  Along with the being brought back into dance element of the stories, the events were unfolding in a city that the characters were new to.  Blake had been transplanted from his Carolina home to Miami, to live with his father.  His mother had passed away in a car accident and, because he was underage, he was forced to move to Miami.  It was where his estranged father, and new legal guardian, lived.  Moose began Step Up 3D by moving to New York for school.  He had originally come from Baltimore, and had left to pursue his career in engineering, a career that would be hinted at again in Step Up: All In.  The two characters were out of their normal environment, and as such, were able to shed the shells that they had built to be the best dancers they could be.

There was a common romantic thread to both movies as well.  In Holiday Spin, Blake fell in love with Pia, a dancer from out of town who was staying at his father’s place while training for the Holiday Spin competition.  She had a falling out with her former dance partner and ended up falling in love with Blake while also training with him for the competition.  Step Up 3D saw Luke (not Moose this time) falling in love with Natalie.  Natalie had left her previous dance crew and started training with Luke’s crew while their relationship bloomed.  The connection between Pia and her former partner was that they were in a relationship and the partner had cheated on her.  The connection between Natalie and her former crew was that the leader was her brother.  Those weren’t the same connections, exactly, but they were tarnished relationships that led to romance with a dancer from another team.

One other thing about the ruined relationships was that the female character would end up having to go against the male character she had left in the final dance-off.  During the Holiday Spin competition, Pia and Blake faced off against the man who had cheated on her.  In the end, the main characters were victorious, and the cheater got the comeuppance he deserved.  Step Up 3D saw Natalie teaming up with Luke’s crew during the final battle where they were against her brother’s crew.  She had fully turned against her brother and was helping Luke and his crew come out victorious in the end.  Happy endings were a part of both movies thanks to the woman turning against the villainous man.

An obstacle that was shared between the two films was the loss of a training location.  In Holiday Spin, that location was the studio in which Blake and Pia trained.  The downstairs studio in the house where they lived was vandalized one night.  They could no longer use it, and suspected that Pia’s former partner was the cause.  That was never confirmed or denied.  They had to find another location to practice their dancing and found it afterhours in a gym.  Step Up 3D was a little different in the reasoning and specific locations, but the loss had the same impact on the story.  The loft where the dance crew hung out and trained was foreclosed because Luke couldn’t make the payment.  They now needed to win the competition to get their loft back.  For the time being, though, they needed a new place to train.  Moose got in contact with Jenny Kido, someone from his Baltimore days, and she let them use her family’s closed arcade in New York.  They worked out their dance moves there and ended up going on to win the competition.

Holiday Spin put a Christmas twist on a dance story that had been told before.  It added some new stuff including a martial arts fight against a bully, and some cheating sex.  Those were simple cosmetic additions though.  At its core, Holiday Spin told the same story as Step Up 3D.  It’s something that happens in movies a lot.  One movie will come out with a story that harkens back to something you may have already seen.  There’s usually something to make it a little different though.  Christmas movies are notorious for it.  Retelling a story is as much a Christmas tradition as your family getting drunk on egg nog.  But, as has been said many times in this blog, it’s not about the originality of a story so much as the originality of how it’s told.  Christmas movies are usually told with originality, which makes them a great thing to have at this time of year.

Now let’s get to some notes:

• Garrett Clayton, who played Blake in Holiday Spin, was also in The Oogieloves in the Big Balloon Adventure (week 39).
• Holiday Spin featured Dan Joffre.  He was previously in Air Buddies (week 270).
• Finally, Ralph Macchio made his return in Holiday Spin, after being featured in Up the Academy (week 136).
• Have you seen Holiday Spin or Step Up 3D?  What did you think about them?  Do you think they’re as similar as I’m making them out to be?  Let me know in the comments.
• The comments and Twitter are good places to suggest movies I should be checking out for the Sunday “Bad” Movies.  I like suggestions because they could be movies that I don’t know about that help me broaden the movies I cover.
• Sometimes when I’m watching bad movies, I share bits and pieces of them on Snapchat.  Add me (jurassicgriffin) if you’re interested in that.
• It’s time to figure out what next week’s movie will be.  I still don’t have my schedule back, so I’m going to have to pull this one out of thin air again.  Next week is New Year’s week, so I want a movie that involves that holiday.  I think I might have actually scheduled this one for next week originally, but I’m not sure.  I’ll be watching 1980’s New Year’s Evil.  I’ll see you then.