Canada may have been late to the game with its horror output, but the country more than made up for it by producing some of the genres finest films. Their titles need little introduction, as its a legacy that stretches from Black Christmas all the way up to more recently released films like Pontypool and Hobo With a Shotgun. In between, the likes of Rituals, Prom Night, Terror Train, My Bloody Valentine, The Changeling, Ginger Snaps, and the first decade of David Cronenbergs filmography all hailed from the Great White North, each a part of the distinct Canuxploitation tradition (with many being homegrown under the auspices of a tax shelter, much to the governments dismay in some cases).
But these filmshaving been enshrined into the canon (or at least well on their way there)dont really require another round of praise. Instead, Im more interested in digging beneath the surface of the Canadian B-movie soil, which has yielded a truly weird and fantastic crop over the years. Many are the result of filmmaking luminaries working to find the voice that would deliver later classics, while others are offbeat riffs on familiar subgenres and themes. Consider this a list of essential B-sides that work in concert with the countrys Greatest Hits to create a vital oeuvre full of body horror, backwoods psychos, gore-soaked slashers, and whatever the hell Things is.
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Brett Gallman is a member of the Online Film Critics Society. He was raised in and around video stores and hasnt stopped talking about horror movies ever since. You can find him on Twitter @brettgallman.
Canuxploitation
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Canuxploitation #1
The Mask [1961] (d. Julian Roffman, w. Frank Taubes, Sandy Haver, Franklin Delessert, & Slavko Vorkapich
Despite its status as Canada’s first horror feature, Julian Roffman’s trippy and belated entry to the 3-D craze still feels under-appreciated (it has yet to receive an official DVD release, even). Its embraceing of the third dimension appears more gimmicky than its predecessors, as viewers are implored to don their glasses whenever the on-screen characters wear the titular mask, an ancient Indian artifact that offers a glimpse into a nightmarish netherworld.
However, the gag actually drags audiences further into spectacular visions of hell that fling gonzo imagery right into their faces: a Lovecraftian claw emerges from the fog-shrouded ground, surrounded by dislodged eyeballs, spewing flames, and mysterious demons ferrying caskets downriver, all further rendered unreal by the black-and-white photography. Simultaneously an indelible descent into homicidal madness and an obvious addiction parable, The Mask set the tone for Canuxploitation, as its surreal strain of lunacy infected the country’s cinematic DNA for decades.
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Canuxploitation #2
Cannibal Girls [1973] (d. Ivan Reitman, w. Daniel Goldberg, Ivan Reitman, & Robert Sandler
The Mask didn’t exactly blow open the levees, however, as the country would spend most of the following decade churning out a handful of exploitation movies until establishment of the Canadian Film Development Corporation in 1968 ignited the first true explosion of genre output. One of the most noteworthy (in that it was among the first to make its government patrons squeamish) hailed from then-unknown Ivan Reitman, whose later comedy efforts are presaged by this demented romp in rural, snowbound Farnhamville. Local lore insists a trio of man-eating women roam the countryside, and a young couple (Eugene Levy and Andrea Martin) quickly learn it’s not just the stuff of legend.
Reitman’s comedy instincts are channeled here into wry black humor that pokes fun at conventions that were only beginning to coalesce (Cannibal Girls was produced and released concurrently with The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, but you’d swear the former was somehow riffing on the latter). Unfolding with a nightmare logic similar to The Mask, Cannibal Girls feels like a uniquely Canadian spin on British occult movies, as the nation’s signature cordiality is but a façade concealing gruesome, syrupy, and riotous sleaze.
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Canuxploitation #3
Deathdream [1974] (d. Bob Clark, w. Alan Ormsby)
Before ushering in (or at least anticipating) the slasher boom with Black Christmas, Bob Clark looked to be the heir apparent to George Romero. While working in his native Florida, he directed undead schlock-fest Children Shouldn’t Play With Dead Things, a low-budget production that caught the eye of a Toronto drive-in distributor. The next logical step was to import Clark to helm Deathdream, a zombie film that twists “The Monkey’s Paw” into a Vietnam fable by way of EC Comics. Where Romero’s vacant horde of ghouls subliminally evokes the damned souls of this era, Clark focuses intimately and directly on the fallout surrounding one soldier. Leave it to Canada to produce one of the first truly vital Vietnam films.
When Andy (Richard Backus) mysteriously returns home from war after being reported dead, his family is initially elated; as the days unfold, however, they can’t help but notice that Andy isn’t the same man. Now a dead-eyed husk craving blood, he feasts on those around him. Pointedly set in an American town despite its Canuck roots, Deathdream confronts what few films were willing to tackle at the time and does so with captivating performances and gut-punching gore courtesy of Tom Savini. A bridge between Canada’s outlandish splatter output and its more thoughtful political fare, Deathdream is a powerful PTSD allegory that transcends its historical context.
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Canuxploitation #4
Deranged: The Confessions of a Necrophile [1974] (d. Jeff Gillen & Alan Ormsby, w. Alan Ormsby)
Not everyone was willing to cast aside some good old fashioned schlock in the wake of Deathdream, including Clark’s co-writer Alan Ormsby. Fresh off of that film (and with Savini in tow), Ormsby retreated to the comfort of backwoods psychos with Deranged. Compounding the familiarity is the obvious inspiration: Ed Gein, the notorious maniac whose grisly exploits were mirrored in Psycho and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. Dismissing Deranged as a mash-up of those two classics is tempting, but reductive since this is a thoroughly idiosyncratic take on the Plainfield butcher’s deeds.
Presented (loosely) as a pseudo-documentary that dares viewers to laugh at the unhinged life of Ezra Cobb (Roberts Blossom), the film invites audiences to gawk at what was only suggested by its more famous predecessors. Psycho reveals a corpse in Norman Bates’s basement; this one goes into agonizing detail when Cobb recreates his own mother’s carcass by scooping the brains and eyes out of a freshly buried body in the local cemetery. Cast in the detached, chilly mold typical of this era’s Canuxploitation, Deranged takes some liberties with the Gein case by highlighting Cobb’s necrophilia, but it’s in the service of a definitive tale of backwater madness. To my knowledge, no other film can boast Roberts Blossom bludgeoning a woman to death with a leg bone—keep that image in mind the next time you watch Home Alone.
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Canuxploitation #5
Shivers [1975] (d. & w. David Cronenberg)
No matter how obvious it may be, no discussion of Canada’s horror output can avoid mention of David Cronenberg. And while it may be considered a stretch to consider Shivers an under-seen B-side, it’s fair to say it’s lived in the shadow of his later work. With this debut, Canada unleashed an auteur whose sensibilities and preoccupations were as stark as the blindingly sanitary setting here, as Cronenberg transforms the sickly tax shelter aesthetic into a twisted vision of a sterile society set to be undone by sex and disease. Carnal urges become horrific propositions as venereal leeches spread throughout a Toronto apartment complex, incubating within bodies before tearing them apart from the inside.
What’s truly terrifying is that this gross-out epidemic somehow breaks up the doldrums in this dull, sterilized culture. As is the case with Cronenberg’s later work, it’s customary to project a growing paranoia surrounding STDs onto Shivers, but it’s more primal than that, even: Shivers exploits fear of decay and insinuates that this sort of visceral purge is a necessary purifying agent for a society already rotting away from the decay of ennui. What’s a parasitic leech if everyone’s already a little dead on the inside anyway?
Easily one of the most notorious Canuxploitation offerings ever, Shivers lived up to its name by sending a cold chill down the spine of uptight moralists who questioned if Canada’s tax dollars should be devoted to such filth (considering it was being peddled by Ivan Reitman under the working title Blood Orgy of the Parasites, it’s hard to sympathize—clearly they knew what they were getting into!). Four decades later, it’s clear that it was one of the best uses of that money.
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Canuxploitation #6
Cathy’s Curse [1977] (d. Eddy Matalon, w. Myra Clément, Eddy Matalon, & Alain Sens-Cazenave)
Europe just could not stop ripping off The Exorcist and The Omen in the 70s, and its madness eventually crossed the Atlantic with this French-Canadian co-production. Director Eddy Matalon veers Cathy’s Curse right into the Euro-horror realm with its elliptical editing, ragged camerawork, spacey acting (made all the more spacey by dopey dubbed dialogue), and a general disregard for coherence, tact, and any semblance of reality. Naturally, it’s an amazing, almost alchemic blend of bad ideas and even poorer execution. It’s the sort of film that opens with a man explaining to his daughter that her mother is a bitch before both perish in a fiery car crash.
Then it leaves viewers guessing just exactly what’s going on once it jumps ahead a couple of decades to focus on Cathy (Randi Allen), the most demented and profane bad seed this side of the hellspawn from The Visitor. Scratch that: let’s just consider Cathy’s Curse one of the most insane experiences this side of The Visitor, full stop. Have you ever wondered what Orphan might have looked like had it derailed right out of the gate? This offers a glimpse and then some. If baffling, obscene dialogue and hysterical performances could be converted into currency, Cathy’s Curse would be among the richest of the 70s Exorcist knock-offs.
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Canuxploitation #7
Funeral Home [1980] (d. William Fruet, w. Ida Nelson)
Psycho cast a long shadow that extended all the way up to the Great White North. Eventually, even Canuxploitation stalwart William Fruet found himself caught in it. A name synonymous with rural Canadian nightmares, Fruet helmed two classics in the sub-genre in Death Weekend and Baker County, USA. Sandwiched between these rugged excursions into psycho-sleaze is Funeral Home, a more restrained slasher that borrows from the Psycho playbook right down to cribbing some of Hitchcock’s shots.
Since the body count boom hadn’t quite exploded just yet, Funeral Home relies more on atmosphere and labyrinthine plot mechanics as a meandering murder mystery unfolds around Heather (under-appreciated Canadian screen queen Lesleh Donaldson), a high school girl spending summer vacation at her grandparent’s home, which, as the title implies, once doubled as a mortuary. Conveniently, corpses pile up alongside bizarre developments (such as granny holding conversations with an unseen person down in the cellar), and Fruet patiently soaks it in the desolate, rustic surroundings.
As always, he uncovers the terror lying in wait, ready to ambush any poor bastard who wanders into the Canadian wilderness. Throughout his career, Fruet could not be clearer: stick to the main roads, for dirt paths and rickety houses bathed in moonlight might lead to your body being dumped into a quarry.
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Canuxploitation #8
Happy Birthday to Me [1981] (d. J. Lee Thompson, w. John Saxton, Peter Jobin, & Timothy Bond)
Once the splatter movie boom did explode, Canada naturally made a cottage industry out of it, so much so that this entire list could easily be composed of these efforts alone. The roster was so impressive that even the incredible Happy Birthday to Me feels relegated to the bench at times. Immortalized thanks to its shish kabob cover art (though anyone who’s seen it can attest that the weightlifting sequence is the signature scene here), the film hoards even more outrageous thrills beyond that gruesome image.
And get this: nearly all of them are insane plot developments rather than gore displays. Indeed, this J. Lee Thompson film seems to commit some cardinal slasher sins: at 110 minutes, it’s practically a tome, and it has the gall to only scatter about a half-dozen corpses during sequences that were predictably hacked by an MPAA out for blood in the wake of Friday the 13th.
But still: holy shit, this movie. On its surface a standard slasher tale about a madman knocking off snobby kids at an elite academy, Happy Birthday to Me isn’t content with one layer. When Lesleh Donaldson doesn’t even make it past the opening scene, a wild ride is surely ahead, one that has Glenn Ford serving as an on-call psychiatrist to Ginny Wainwright (Melissa Sue Anderson, perfectly wavering between sweet and batty), a senior whose repressed trauma won’t stay buried. Flashbacks to her unconscionable brain surgery provide both the requisite splatter and the hint that Happy Birthday to Me is set to explore some insane places.
By the time it arrives at its delirious climax, it more than delivers on that promise: Sharon Acker’s over-the-top performance reaches for melodramatic highs and ushers in a barrage of twists and revelations, all potent ingredients in a cake that layers Agatha Christie and Scooby-Doo right on top of each other.
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Canuxploitation #9
Humongous [1982] (d. Paul Lynch, w. William Gray)
After conceiving one of the earliest high school slashers in Prom Night, director Paul Lynch and writer William Gray retreated to the genre’s other familiar haunt in Humongous, as audiences once again were treated to a psycho stalking a group of thick, hormonal teenagers in the woods. This is an especially dopey bunch, though: its alpha male, Nick (John Wildman), is prone to pulling a gun on his own brother to assert his authority aboard their yacht, and it’s his stupidity that results in the boat crashing and burning, leaving them stranded on a nearby island. Lynch patiently allows the group to explore the island (and each other) before getting to the slashing (which ends up more like bashing once the titular Humongous appears).
A fine example of a slasher that thrives on campfire atmosphere, Humongous parcels out just enough information to string these ill-fated teens (and the audience) along: locals whisper about a woman who has spent most of her life in isolation on the island, keeping only her dogs as company. These hounds still howl in the distance, but the house itself hoards corpses and clues that this island isn’t as desolate as the legends insist. Before long, the teens find themselves at the mercy of a feral, territorial giant who bashes, smashes, and crunches his way through them. Comparisons to Jason Voorhees are inevitable, what with all the mommy issues and a climax that duplicates Friday the 13th Part II, yet Humongous is ultimately its own savage beast, a real face-crusher of a film.
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Canuxploitation #10
City in Panic [1986] (d. Robert Bouvier, w. Andreas Blackwell, Peter Wilson)
Here’s a case of a film achieving a spot out of sheer notoriety. At first glance, this late-80s slasher seems pretty typical—and then it becomes clear that the unseen psycho here is specifically targeting HIV-infected gay men in a film that was originally titled The AIDS Murders. There’s exploitation, and then there’s this, a bizarrely effective movie that brazenly feeds off of contemporary headlines in the most lurid way possible. When Toronto’s scummy streets become littered with hacked bodies, radio host Dave Miller (David Adamson) is compelled to snuff out the killer, who dubs themselves “M” and dresses like they raided a giallo fashion closet.
Harking back to the street-level scuzziness of Maniac and The New York Ripper, City in Panic often just feels nasty, even if it’s not quite as exploitative of its subject matter as you might expect. Rather than wallow in gay panic, it’s actually quite sensitive to the plight of the homosexual community, and the film’s raging homophobe is a mouth-breathing buffoon. A grisly restaging of Psycho’s shower scene and other murder sequences (plus a chase through a spooky mannequin factory) are highlights in this grungy, psychosexual hothouse that reminds us that “you can’t just go around killing people just because they have AIDS.”
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Canuxploitation #11
Rock N Roll Nightmare [1987] (d. John Fasano, w. Jon Mikil Thor)
Clark. Reitman. Cronenberg. Fruet. All of these names are synonymous with Canuxploitation, but I submit that John Fasano and Jon Mikil Thor deserve at least a passing mention when discussing this pantheon. Another American import, Fasano’s two collaborations with the Canadian metal demigod are indispensable products of the 80s metalsploitation phase. The second of those two collaborations following the ludicrous Zombie Nightmare, Rock N Roll Nightmare is a truly precious artifact from a glorious time when a horror film could serve as a thinly-disguised vehicle for a Canadian rocker/bodybuilder (Thor was truly an 80s renaissance man).
The setup: with dreams of heavy metal stardom rattling around in their empty heads, a band retreats to a rural barn that’s been converted into a recording studio. What follows (after an interminable driving sequence) is an Evil Dead take-off that’s occasionally interrupted by glorified music videos (Thor provides the score, of course), seductive vixens, zombies, and awkward showers. Continuity and coherence are fast and loose, with characters disappearing and the band playing on without a care.
A seasoned Canuxploitation vet might be tempted to dismiss this one as yet another amateurish romp, at least until the film reveals its hand with a positively unbelievable climax where Thor’s surname is suddenly meant to be taken literally. The only thing more jaw-dropping than this film’s conclusion is the fact that Thor returned 20 years later for a sequel, Intercessor: Another Rock n Roll Nightmare.
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Canuxploitation #12
Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night II [1987] (d. Bruce Pittman, w. Ron Oliver)
Prom Night is one of those slasher series that didn’t really take baby steps in its evolution. With a seven year gap between Paul Lynch’s original and this follow-up, the franchise had some catching up to do, so it skips straight ahead to the glib, tongue-in-cheek approach adopted by later slashers. Where Prom Night was at the forefront of the high school slasher film, Hello Mary Lou arrived after audiences had spent the better part of a decade watching dead teenagers, so it indulges in gleaning delight from characters being hacked, torched, and crushed to death by their own lockers.
Sharing only the setting of the original, this superior sequel takes on a supernatural tenor, as the spirit of tragically slain prom queen Mary Lou Maroney (Lisa Schrage) returns to vanquish the latest batch of brats at Hamilton High School (headed by principal Michael Ironside!). If the prom night massacre from Carrie were stretched out over an entire splatter movie and crossbred with A Nightmare on Elm Street, it would look a lot like Prom Night II, as the film is dedicated to the wise-cracking Mary Lou’s elaborate death sequences and her attempt to possess sweet, virginal Vicki (Wendy Lyon). Speaking of direct rip-offs of more famous slasher sequels: Hello Mary Lou is essentially a gender-swapped take on Freddy’s Revenge, right down to the homoerotic and sexual subtexts.
It also pokes fun at genre’s prudish attitudes towards sex: in the space of about 90 minutes, Schrage not only crafts one of the most indelible slasher icons but also an unforgettable avatar for unrestrained femininity that’s at odds with more traditionally repressed psychos. If anything, she probably thinks her victims aren’t screwing enough. She might hail from the prim and proper 50s, but Mary Lou won’t be denied of either her bloodlust or her regular, good old fashioned lust in this wildly entertaining slasher.
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Canuxploitation #13
Pin: A Plastic Nightmare [1988] (d. Sandor Stern, w. Sandor Stern, Andrew Neiderman)
An outlier in the Canuxploitation ranks (in that it is subtly crazy rather than in-your-face unhinged), Pin creeps along and unnerves through sexual tension that boils for about 100 minutes before frothing to the surface in the form of bludgeonings and axe murders. It’s a slippery effort that jumps through time to reveal the sordid tale of Leon (David Hewlett) and Ursula (Cynthia Preston), a pair of siblings whose bizarre upbringing at the hands of their doctor father (Terry O’Quinn, masterfully playing to creepy expectations in the wake of The Stepfather). A cold, somewhat distant man, their father mostly communicates via Pin, an anatomically correct medical mannequin that becomes his ventriloquist mouthpiece for major conversations, including the one about the birds and the bees.
Between this and catching a nurse using Pin as a sex toy, Leon grows up with a rather warped sense of sexuality. More specifically, he covets his sister, even if he never completely admits it. But come on—here’s a guy who goes shifty-eyed whenever Ursula mentions her boyfriends, and this is not to mention his epic poetry, in which his hero lusts after his own sister. As his urges (or “the need,” as he calls it) simmer within, he takes on a schizoid persona by projecting his confusion and rage onto Pin, who becomes his avatar during a murderous streak. Pin is another psychosexual offering haunted by Psycho’s mommy issues, but it’s a relatively restrained Freudian nightmare, one that relies on tension and exploiting the increasingly awkward space between siblings.
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Canuxploitation #14
Things [1989] (d. Andrew Jordan, w. Andrew Jordan, Barry J. Gillis)
The ultimate maple leaf mind-melter, Things practically defies any rational explanation, but here goes: imagine someone converged pirated UHF signals from the most remote civilization possible, doused them in beer and corn syrup, wrapped them in denim and porn mustaches, and beamed them directly into your skull—that’s Things. An Evil Dead meets Eraserhead meets every Cronenberg body horror movie, it treats a cabin-in-the-woods premise as an opportunity to eviscerate logic and coherence at every turn with bewildering editing, otherworldly characters (they appear human, but I’m skeptical), and a loopy non-plot.
When a couple of brothers (Doug Bunston and Barry J. Gillis) aren’t fending off mutant hellspawn, they marvel at their television reception (the presence of the “bestiality channel” is particularly exciting) and discuss art history. A televised trial regarding the rights to Night of the Living Dead occasionally unfolds, and an awkward exchange with a house doctor somehow figures into proceedings that aren’t hallucinogenic as much as they’re in direct opposition to any semblance of reality. Once the final credits insist that “you have just experienced Things,” you can’t help but agree: nobody watches Things—instead, Things washes over you like a dreamy, sleazy haze.
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Canuxploitation #15
Blood & Donuts [1995] (d. Holly Dale, w. Andrew Rai Berzins)
Believe it or not, filmmaking was able to persist in the wake of Things, with Canuxploitation itself stretching well into the new millennium, albeit at a much slower clip once the CFDC shifted towards made-for-TV fare in the late 80s. Once the tax breaks especially began to dry up by the mid-90s, the scene was a shadow of its former self. This doesn’t mean the era didn’t still spawn some noteworthy films like Blood & Donuts, a vampire film that seeks to subvert the expectations surrounding the genre (believe it or not, there was once a time when that didn’t happen so regularly that folks immediately rolled their eyes at it).
Opening in a wholly unexpected place, with footage of Apollo 11’s moon landing, Blood & Donuts quickly arrives in modern day Toronto, where bloodsucker Boya (Gordon Currie) has been asleep for 25 years. Upon being awakened by a golf ball, he sets out to explore a world unknown to him. The American independent film scene seems to the most obvious guiding force here, as Blood & Donuts takes some obvious cues from that movement by blending low-key slice-of-life moments with a gangster subplot (with David Cronenberg cameoing as a ruthless crime lord!).
As a Jim Jarmusch-esque hangout flick, it’s a suitably shaggy look at a bunch of oddballs (Boya falls in with a cabbie and Molly, a donut shop girl) trying to get through life. For Boya, that entails evading a jilted lover from his past and concealing his thirst for blood as he falls for Molly, and director Holly Dale takes a contemplative approach in documenting his forlorn condition. Some passages feel as though someone’s senior philosophy thesis leaked into the screenplay, but, on the whole, Blood & Donuts is a cool, up-all-night movie that just happens to feature a vampire.
