When What A Night For A Knight was broadcast on September 13, 1969, Scooby Doo! hardly seemed like a show that would still be around, in one incarnation or another, some five decades later. Viewed today, the most striking thing is how little the show departed from the blueprint laid down by its debut episode. Shaggy’s bell-bottoms, the Mystery Machine, the chase and climactic unmasking are all present and correct. Even after umpteen different series, two big budget feature films, plus a slew of straight-to-DVD titles as well as specials, spin-offs and spoofs, Fred still wears his lucky Ascot, Daphne’s favourite colour is still purple and Velma remains an aficionado of chunky sweaters. If a show with mediocre animation, lame dialogue and recycled plots can enjoy massive success, even the most hopeless filmmakers can take heart.
Lured into filmmaking by Glen Or Glenda producer George Weiss, Michael and Roberta Findlay unleashed on 42nd Street audiences some of the most inept and primitive sexploitation films of the ‘60s before entering the horror genre with The Slaughter (1971), which was later distributed as the notorious Snuff (“A film that could only be made in South America, where life is cheap!”). By 1972, the husband and wife team had fallen in with director Ed Adlum for Invasion Of The Blood Farmers, where dungaree-clad ‘Druids’ in straw hats eat dogs, exsanguinate their victims in a garden shed and murder a character named Jim Carrey. World-beatingly terrible in all departments, from Roberta’s blurry cinematography to Michael’s unique editing style (which leaves in shots of actors waiting for their cue), the film failed to recoup its $24,000 budget on release, so when the trio regrouped for Shriek Of The Mutilated (1974), it was with Adlum as producer and Michael as director, which at least cut down on the mix of day/night shots.
It’s probably going out on a limb to describe Shriek as the first horror film to rip off Hanna-Barbera, but consider the storyline. When Dr Prell recruits four students – including a leggy clotheshorse, a redhead with oversized glasses, a cool-headed jock and a joker – for an expedition to find a Yeti in upstate New York (why not?), they travel to an isolated cabin in a van with flower decals on the side, encounter a mute, sinister housekeeper and are chased by a silly-looking creature whose appearance causes the redhead to fall and lose her glasses. After setting a trap that fails, the ‘monster’ is revealed to be one Dr Werner in a costume, who along with Prell has been perpetuating the Yeti myth to draw attention away from their nefarious schemes that, in this R-rated version, include luring young people to a deserted locale so the flesh-eating academics can devour them.
Okay, so the filmmakers probably didn’t sit down and say to each other, “You know what’d make lots of money? Scooby Doo with tits!” They were more likely cashing in on the Drive-in success of The Legend Of Boggy Creek (1972), which proved the box-office potential of a cheaply-made man-in-a-suit monster movie, and the similarities to the show worked their way in. Which they were bound to do, because quick-buck exploitation reduces everything to the level of a cartoon. Hacks aren’t skilled enough to write scripts so they recycle clichés. They can’t create characters so they rely on ‘types’: the hero/leader; the damsel-in-distress; the brainy girl; the comic relief. You can tell who’s who just by looking at them.
Moral: bad intentions result in worse pictures, especially if you’re a porn grad looking to get rich.
Which is also true of Friday The 13th.
Having gained notoriety first as the director of Together (“Finally, an X-rated picture your wife or girlfriend can enjoy!”), then as the producer of The Last House On The Left, Sean S Cunningham turned out a string of flops before calling his friend Victor Miller in the summer of 1979 and saying, “Halloween is making a lot of money. Why don’t we rip it off?” Nobody who sought to imitate John Carpenter’s film did so because they admired its sophistication but because the $325,000 movie grossed $18,500,000 in North America alone, making it one of the most commercially successful independent films of the decade. Cunningham may not have been the first prospector at the site, but he was the next one to strike gold; when Paramount released Friday in May 1980, the $500, 000 quickie grossed $5.8m in its first three days. Of the studio’s pictures that year, only Urban Cowboy and Airplane! made more money.
For all its massive success, though, Friday’s most interesting aspects are what it blatantly copies (title, opening sequence, basic premise) and what it’s too unsophisticated to even attempt (widescreen cinematography, hiring name actors, slow-burn suspense). Every hoary cliché worked its way into Miller’s script: the scenic town with a Dark Past; the Prophet of Doom; the Comically Unhelpful Cop; the Car That Won’t Start; the Climactic Thunderstorm; the Talking Villain; the It-Was-Only-A-Dream Scene. You get a fair idea of what you’re in for when a camper approaches a dog and asks, “Do you speak English?”
Also, the fact that Friday was distributed by a major studio (rather than an independent outfit, as Shriek and Halloween were) cannot be overstated. Its success proved you didn’t need big stars, expensive effects or an Oscar-winning script based on a worldwide bestseller to enjoy a monster hit, just a good ol’ Drive-in movie that played to necking teenagers. This was ironic: Drive-ins, the home of B-grade horror, were in decline, and as multiplexes began inheriting their audiences – those that hadn’t been lost to VHS – studios catered for them with pictures that were slick, calculated and more than a little cartoonish.
All the ‘murders’ in Paramount’s April Fool’s Day, for instance, turn out to have been staged by rich girl Muffy St Clair, who plans to turn her home into a country inn that holds murder weekends with fake cops, fake clues and fake corpses. Scarcely more believable is the villain in Friday The 13th Part V: A New Beginning, who’s dressing up as Jason Voorhees to avenge his son, or the Sheriff in Slumber Party Massacre II who tells a group of meddling kids, “You jerk my chain in my town and I’ll rip your goddamn lungs out!” And we can’t forget A Nightmare On Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge with its homoerotic subtext.
The 90s temporarily retired Freddy( in 3D!), sent Jason to Hell, shot Pinhead into space and linked Michael Myers to the Druids, so it was a relief when Scream arrived, but anyone who tells you that Wes Craven’s landmark movie changed the genre for the better is sadly mistaken. It was Halloween redux, the big success that opened the door for a series of laughably bad clones and rip-offs. No picture that considers itself ‘hip’ and ‘self-aware’ should be a remake, have a character named ‘Creepy Janitor’ or be produced by Michael Bay. Also, no more casting of Brad Dourif as the Weird Stranger, okay?
Things came full circle with Raja Gosnell’s live-action Scooby Doo (2002), whose casting gave horror fans a few chuckles. Freddie Prinze jr had played a very Fred Jones-ish hero/leader in I Know What You Did Last Summer and its sequel, while his wife, Sarah Michelle Gellar, couldn’t set foot on a horror film set without being chased by a masked villain (Scream 2), creepy kids (The Grudge) or a sinister fisherman (I Know What You Did Last Summer). Linda Cardellini’s smart girl was appropriately taken for granted in Strangeland, while Matthew Lillard had been playing Shaggy for years in Scream, Dead Man’s Curve and 13 Ghosts (or Thir13en Ghosts, whatever), and would be playing him for years afterwards, voicing the character on numerous DVD movies as well as the Scooby Doo: Mystery Incorporated series.
Devil worshippers run Hollywood, but they’re not without a sense of humour….
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