![]() There is only the sporadic gag that is aimed at parodying the genre. You have the feeling that the people involved in Pandemonium/Thursday the 12th either weren’t very experienced in the genre they were drawing from or else had just been given some money and told to go away and make another cartoony spoof in the style of the recent hit of the disaster movie parody Airplane/Flying High (1980). The most professional of these is Tom Smothers playing a Dudley Do-Right character who has an unnatural relationship with his horse and comes accompanied by a snivelly Paul Reubens (in his pre-Pee-Wee Herman days) as a deputy. The worst of these might be almost any scene involving a then unknown Judge Reinhold. ![]() I don’t get the impression that Alfred Sole is a comedy director by nature and there often seems an attitude of try anything for a laugh, which results in some very frenetic and almost completely unfunny silliness and slapstick. Most of Pandemonium seems to have been assembled with a shambling anything goes haphazardness. Tom Smothers as the Canadian Mountie who has unnatural affections for his horse and Candy Azzara as the head of the cheerleading school Clearly intending to capitalise on this, the film here was originally titled Thursday the 12th before being given the more anonymous title of Pandemonium for release – as such, it did no business, although you could guarantee that if it had been released under its spoofy title as originally intended, it would have gone much further. ![]() All of these parodies share in common the fact that they are not particularly good or even funny. All of these are centred around spoofing the slasher film, which only really came into existence a couple of years earlier with Halloween (1978) and then Friday the 13th (1980), which produced a host of imitators. Others among these include Saturday the 14th (1981), Student Bodies (1981) and National Lampoon’s Class Reunion (1982). Pandemonium was one of a spate of horror parodies, principally of the slasher films, that all appeared around the same time. Nowadays, Sole has retired from directing and works as a production designer in tv. These include the Catholic psycho-thriller Communion/Alice Sweet Alice (1976), which was in danger of attaining a cult following at one point, and Tanya’s Island (1980), an erotic desert island love story between a woman and an ape. The first was a porn film but all the others fall within genre territory. Nevertheless, he has appeared on one’s genre radar screens several times. Alfred Sole is a director who has bubbled under the radar of general visibility but has remained almost entirely unrecognised by the mainstream.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |