Before
becoming a prolific production designer in the film industry, Alfred Sole once
gained notoriety for the short adult film Deep
Sleep before making a name for himself with the surprise hit 1976 giallo
inspired horror film Alice, Sweet Alice. Circa 1982, with the rise of the horror
parody film including but not limited to Student
Bodies and Full Moon High, it
seemed only natural that the director of one of the scariest films of the 1970s
should do one of these. Featuring a star
studded cast including Carol Kane, Phil Hartman, Judge Reinhold and Paul
Reubens (Pee Wee’s Big Adventure),
what became known as the slasher horror parody Pandemonium was shaping up to be a surefire comedy hit.
Unfortunately
however, what emerged was more akin to the psychedelic Egyptian-Italian
weirdness of Ovidio G. Assonitis’ The
Visitor than, say, a Zucker Brothers film.
The story is standard slasher fare: in 1963 a group of high school cheerleaders
are impaled on a spear by a mysterious killer, causing a scandal that forces
the school to close. Years later, former
student turned cheerleading instructor Bambi (Candy Azzara) seeks to reopen the
school. As expected, the killer returns
to pick up where he left off by murdering the new students.
Turning
out to be the final film as a director for Alfred Sole, something is amiss
right from the get go as joke after joke falls flat and provokes more wrinkled
brows than laughs. If Pandemonium is a comedy it surely is
among the very strangest with increasingly weird sight gags including but not
limited to death by way of toothbrush. Given
this was co-written by eventual TV-show writer Richard Whitley of Roseanne and Millennium, the absence of straightforward comedy or horror in Pandemonium seems that much
stranger. The best gag in the film
involves a Carrie parody featuring When a Stranger Calls star Carol Kane
replete with glowing red eyes that shoot lasers. Paul Reubens as a cop occasionally does the Pee-Wee Herman voice but it comes too
little too late amid everything else.
A
light PG rated horror comedy of the most bewildering kind, Pandemonium enjoyed a modest theatrical run before becoming a cable
TV regular and ultimately disappearing from the comedy horror shelves in
videostores indefinitely. Thanks to the
good folks at Vinegar Syndrome, however, this peculiar and not entirely
successful parody oddity has been resurrected in a new 2K digital
restoration. Remembered for forming
question marks over viewers’ heads rather than elicit chuckles, Pandemonium doesn’t really work all that
well but has enough at stake from the cast and crew to still attract the
interest of cult horror aficionados.
--Andrew Kotwicki
