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Mutilator (The) AKA Fall Break (Blu-ray)
[Blu-ray]
Blu-ray ALL - United Kingdom - Arrow Films Review written by and copyright: Paul Lewis (20th February 2016). |
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The Film
 The Mutilator AKA Fall Break (Buddy Cooper, 1984)  Self-financed using a bank loan to the tune of $450,000, The Mutilator (also known as Fall Break, 1984) was the brainchild of Buddy Cooper, an attorney who decided to break into filmmaking. Made during the era in which American stalk-and-slash/bodycount/slasher films were focusing on various holidays – including Halloween (John Carpenter, 1978), Mother’s Day (Charles Kaufman, 1980), Thanksgiving (John Grissmer’s Blood Rage, made in 1983 but released in 1987), Christmas (Charles E Sellier Jr’s Silent Night, Deadly Night, 1984) and Valentine’s Day (George Mihalka’s My Bloody Valentine, 1981) – Cooper’s film clutches at straws for relevance to that tradition by setting the narrative during ‘fall break’ (autumn half-term/reading week).
The Mutilator begins innocuously enough, with a woman (Pamela Weddle Cooper) preparing a birthday cake for her husband and their son, Ed (Trace Cooper), cleaning his father’s guns as a birthday present… Wait a minute… Yes, that’s right: he’s cleaning his father’s guns(!) We know this because a sign stuck to the front of the gun cabinet reads: ‘Happy Birthday, Daddy. All cleaned by me’, and the boy removes one of the weapons from the cabinet to break it down and give it the old spit and polish. However, the gun goes off accidentally, killing Ed’s mother. The boy’s father, Big Ed (Jack Chatham), returns and, seeing his wife’s corpse on the floor of the kitchen, strikes the child before sinking into a corner and drinking himself into an oblivion – a state which defines the rest of his life. From here, the film advances forwards in time: twenty years later, young Ed is now a college student (Matt Mitler), and he receives a telephone call from his father asking him to close up Big Ed’s beachside condo for the winter. Big Ed, it seems, has gone on one of his regular benders and is unable to do it for himself. As the task he has been given by his father falls in the autumn mid-semester break, Ed asks his girlfriend, the virginal Pam (Ruth Martinez), and his friends – Ralph (Bill Hitchcock) and Sue (Connie Rogers), and Mike (Morel Lampley) and Linda (Frances Raines) – to accompany him, with the intention of spending a relaxing break at Big Ed’s condo.  Matters become complicated when Ed and his friends arrive at the condo and find Big Ed’s gruesome hunting trophies, including a framed photograph of a man Big Ed killed in an accident involving the outboard motor of a speedboat. Hiding in the garage with his treasured medieval battleaxe, Big Ed begins to stalk the youngsters, murdering them one by one in the hopes of settling a score with his son.
The opening sequence depicting the child Ed’s accidental killing of his mother whilst cleaning Big Ed’s guns is unusual for a stalk-and-slash picture. Though American slasher films often begin with a sequence set in the diegetic past, these sequences usually depict either the killer’s first murder (for example, John Carpenter’s Halloween, 1978, which opens with the child Michael Myers’ murder of his sister) or harm enacted towards the killer, thus offering a rationale for her/his spree of violence later in the picture (for example, Tony Maylam’s The Burning, 1981, which begins with the tormenting of the camp caretaker in a prank that goes badly awry, leading him to become badly burned). By contrast, The Mutilator begins with innocent Ed’s accidental killing of his mother, precipitating Big Ed’s spiral into murderous, alcoholic despair. Given the conventions of the slasher picture, during a first viewing of The Mutilator, a viewer might expect a ‘twist’ in the tale that reveals the younger Ed to be the killer – but no such twist appears.  Big Ed’s plan throughout seems to be to kill his son: this would appear to be his primary, and only, motive. Scenes of Big Ed alone, hiding in the garage or elsewhere, are punctuated by moments of fantasy – denoted as such by their abstract setting (a purely black backdrop) – in which Ed murders his son (as the child he was in the opening sequence, rather than as the adult he is during the bulk of the film’s narrative) in various grisly ways: throttling him, shooting him, and slitting his throat with Big Ed’s beloved battleaxe. He is haunted by the accidental death of his wife. As the opening sequence ends, Big Ed is shown sinking into a pit of alcoholic despair from which we may presume, owing to his behaviour twenty years later, he never recovers. When Ed receives the telephone call from his father asking him to close up the beachside condo for the winter, Ed simply tells his friends that Big Ed is ‘having another one of his spells [….] The kind that come in bottles’. He’s surprised that his father has given him a position of trust, but at this stage in the narrative Ed isn’t aware that Big Ed is setting a trap for him: ‘All my life, the creep [Big Ed] has ignored me and treated me like some red-headed bastard’, Ed tells his friends, ‘Now all of a sudden he calls me up and asks me to do something. Says I’m old enough to “take the responsibility”’. However, before departing for the condo Ed senses that something is awry: ‘I’ve got a bad feeling about this’, he declares.
Later, at the condo Ed’s friends marvel at the hunting and fishing trophies with which Big Ed has decorated the place. ‘Dad used to tell me he’d hunted everything but man’, Ed tells his friends ominously. Big Ed was apparently a trophy hunter: he killed for the trophies, not for food. Amongst the mounted trophies, the youngsters spot a framed photograph: the image appears to depict a man, possibly dead, with severe injuries to his torso. ‘My dad ran over him with a speedboat’, Ed says matter-of-factly before adding, ‘An accident’. It’s a bizarre moment, characteristic of the film’s deadpan humour. Not long after Big Ed has murdered Mike and Linda, the others – unaware of their friends’ deaths – look for the couple and encounter a police officer, Ben (Ben Moore), on the beach. They ask Ben if there’s ‘been some heavy action lately’; he responds by telling the youngsters, ‘Are you kidding? It’s like a graveyard round here’. His choice of words is ironic, given the number of killings that take place on or around the beach during the picture. When the young couples leave, the police officer has his suspicions aroused but is swiftly killed by Big Ed, who decapitates the representative of law and order. The death of the police officer represents an escalation of violence, eliminating the film’s sole figure of authority (other than the corrupt paternal authority represented by Big Ed himself) who may be capable of rescuing the young people.  The film offers a curious mixture of horror and comedy that may alienate some viewers but those who are on the film’s wavelength will find utterly endearing. On the way to the condo, Ed’s group stop off at a store where, buying beer, Ralph sees a sign declaring that the store has a ten per cent discount for those over the age of sixty-five. Ralph challenges this, suggesting that it’s a form of discrimination; he tells the owner of the store that he will buy an extra six-pack of beer if the owner will allow Ralph the ten per cent discount. The owner relents. After Ralph leaves, a local woman walks up to the store owner: ‘Another smart-ass college kid talking himself into buying two six-packs instead of one’, the owner tells her. They both laugh: the locals have outwitted the youngsters who sneer at them. Much later, after Mike and Linda have disappeared, the other young people retire to the condo for the night. Whilst Pam resists Ed’s sexual advances, Sue tells Ralph that although Mike and Linda haven’t returned to the condo for the evening, he must venture downstairs to lock up. Sue suggests that she and Ralph may have sex upon Ralph’s return to the bedroom, and Ralph gets dressed and ready to lock up the condo in a scene which features extreme undercranking – so that the action seems to be sped-up like a chase montage from a Keystone Cops picture. To underscore the allusion to silent film comedy, the scene is accompanied on the soundtrack by jaunty piano music. (Not long after this, Ralph ventures into the garage to look for Mike and Linda and is met by Big Ed, who pushes a pitchfork through Ralph’s throat, thus foregrounding The Mutilator’s abrupt shifts in tone from light slapstick humour to savage violence.)
 These moments of humour are offset by the film’s scenes of violence, which are spectacularly gruesome in places. Early in the film, upon the young friends’ arrival at Big Ed’s condo, Ed shows the others a large fishing gaff; and we all know what Chekhov said about gaffs. The gaff is used by Big Ed in the film’s most grisly murder scene. Big Ed drives the gaff into the groin of one of his female victims in a gruesome parody of the act of rape, and the gaff exits her body near her navel. It’s a scene that, according to makeup effects artist Mark Shostrom (in the interview with him that is included on this Blu-ray release), caused consternation amongst some of the members of the personnel, making one crew member physically sick. (The effect was trimmed by the BBFC for the film’s previous home video releases in the UK.) Big Ed’s favoured weapon is a bizarre medieval-style battleaxe(!) that Ed notices is missing when he and his friends arrive at the condo (‘Sometimes he takes his toys home for a while’, Ed tells his friends). Whilst dreaming of murdering his son, Big Ed sleeps with the axe, caressing it like a lover.
The film’s approach to violence is typical of the American stalk-and-slash film, as is its heavy use of point-of-view shots from the perspective of the killer (Big Ed) as he stalks his victims, and the foregrounding of the ‘final girl’. Early in the film, Pam is established as a virgin who has managed to ward off Ed’s insistence that they sleep together, telling him that she’s willing to lose her virginity to Ed but in the right time and place. To anyone with even a passing interest in the subgenre, Pam’s status as a virgin marks her as the film’s ultimate ‘victor’, the one who will defeat Big Ed. However, she is imperiled subtly when the attention of the other members of the group is drawn towards a curious, ritualistic mask on the wall of the condo. Ed explains that the mask is of the Mayan rain god Chaac, who is associated with ritual sacrifices in which the victims, virgins, would be shot with arrows or beheaded. Where the mentioning of this mask, the gaff and the battleaxe – all within the same scene – would suggest an element of foreshadowing, the mask plays no role in the subsequent events and thus acts as a ‘red herring’ of sorts. (In the second commentary track on this Blu-ray release, Cooper explains that more was going to have been made of the mask, which reappeared in the film’s scripted ending; but owing to the production running out of time, the ending was rewritten at the last minute and the mask forgotten.)  Pam’s insistence on retaining her virginity marks her as different from the other members of the group. Throughout the film, she resists Ed’s attempts to get her in bed; as in many stalk-and-slash films of the ‘classic’ period, the girl who remains ‘pure’ (ie, virginal) survives to the end of the picture and is the only character capable of challenging (and potentially dispatching) the killer. The connection that the film draws between sex and death, a paradigm of many slasher pictures of the era, is foregrounded in the aforementioned murder scene in which Big Ed penetrates one of his female victims with the large fishing gaff: the barbed end of the gaff enters her crotch and exits her stomach. However, the connection between sex and death is also highlighted in the film’s first murder setpiece. After arriving at the condo, Mike and Linda go for a walk on the beach and end up at a swimming pool which is covered over by a huge marquee and lit with an eerie blue light. Mike and Linda strip off and swim in the pool; when Mike exits the pool momentarily, Linda is attacked by Big Ed, who drags her under the water in a slow-motion shot which seems a deliberate homage to the final shot of Sean S Cunningham’s Friday the 13th (1980). Big Ed then leaves a trail for Mike which is composed of elements of Linda’s clothing. His lust overriding his behaviour, Mike follows the trail of clothing, leading him directly to Big Ed – who plunges an outboard motor into Mike’s chest, killing him gruesomely.
The film is uncut, with the previous BBFC-imposed cuts having been waived, running 86:19 mins.  
Video
 Taking up approximately 24Gb of space on a dual-layered Blu-ray disc, The Mutilator is here presented in 1080p, using the AVC codec. Arrow’s original plan was to use the ‘R’ rated US theatrical version of the film (taken from a 35mm print) and create a composite edit of the unrated cut, splicing in the footage cut from the ‘R’ rated version from offcuts. However, it was discovered that an uncut 35mm print was held by the Library of Congress, and Arrow chose instead to scan this print in 2k and use that version as the basis for their Blu-ray release of the film. (The optional introduction by Cooper and Ed Ferrell, presumably recorded before the discovery of the 35mm print of the unrated version at the Library of Congress, still refers to the presentation as a composite, however.) The source materials are in remarkably good shape: there’s some very minor print damage here and there (white flecks and specks, mostly) but nothing too noticeable. Some sequences seem to have been shot with somewhat heavy diffuse light, giving a hazy glow to the image; but that would seem to be a production decision rather than an anomaly within this presentation. As one might expect from a presentation sourced from a print (rather than the film’s negative), contrast levels are quite bold here with some blacks seeming slightly ‘crushed’ in places. However, this isn’t an overriding characteristic of this presentation, and for the most part contrast levels are balanced quite well; the many nighttime sequences show a reasonably good balance of light and dark, with the blue moonlight casting a chiaroscuro across the image (eg, the shafts of light that illuminate Big Ed’s face when he’s hiding in his cubby hole in the garage, peering out at Ed’s friends). A strong level of detail is present throughout the film, and the palette is clear and natural. Finally, a strong encode ensures the presentation retains the structure of 35mm film.
  
Audio
Audio is presented via a LPCM mono track. This is a little ‘muddy’ in places, with some minor background hiss, but dialogue is audible throughout. Range within the track is good, evident from the jaunty opening tune (‘Fall Break’) to the Friday the 13th-inspired cha-cha-cha shenanigans that appear throughout the picture. Optional English subtitles for the Hard of Hearing are provided. These are error free and easy to read.
Extras
The disc includes:  - an audio commentary with Buddy Cooper and Ruth Martinez, moderated by Ewan Cant. Cooper and Martinez reflect on the making of The Mutilator. There’s some good discussion here of how The Mutilator sits in relation to the conventions of the stalk-and-slash film – and other examples of the subgenre.
- a second audio commentary with Buddy Cooper, John Douglass, Matt Mitler and Ed Ferrell, moderated by Ewan Cant. This is a lively, fun track which features many anecdotes about the production of the film. There’s some overlap with both the other commentary track and the documentary included on this disc (especially in terms of Cooper’s comments), but despite this the film’s fans will find listening to this track to be an entertaining experience. Particularly interesting is the discussion of how the film differed from its script owing to limitations of time and budget (for example, the dropping of the references to the ritualistic mask in the latter half of the picture, and the changing of the ending). - ‘Fall Breakers’ (75:01). This documentary about the making of the film features input from Cooper, co-director John Douglass, makeup effects assistant and assistant editor Edmund Ferrell, and actors Matt Mitier, Pamela Cooper, Ruth Martinez Tutterow, Jack Chatham, Bill Hitchcock and Trace Cooper. Cooper reveals that he made the film owing to a windfall of just over $80,000. Cooper wrote some scenes for what would become the film’s screenplay whilst in John Douglass’ screenwriting class. Ferrell talks about how he came to be involve in the picture’s special effects after the woman who was originally commissioned to work on the effects had an argument with her boyfriend on the set of the picture. The cast reflect on their respective roles in the film and how they were approached to act in it, and the ways in which specific effects were achieved are discussed in some detail. The subjects are all interviewed separately, and their comments are interspersed with clips from the film, production stills and behind the scenes footage. It’s an excellent, thorough documentary, with the warmth of the participants shining through. - an optional introduction by Buddy Cooper and Ed Ferrell (1:08), in which Cooper and Ferrell underscore for viewers the fact that the version of the film they are about to watch is uncut. (As noted above, this was presumably recorded before the discovery of a complete print of the film at the US Library of Congress, owing to the pair’s suggestion that the presentation is a composite of the US ‘R’ rated cut and the MPAA offcuts.) - ‘Mutilator Memories’ (15:57). In this interview, makeup effects artist Mark Shostrom talks about his work on The Mutilator. Shostrom reflects on his career prior to the picture. He discusses in detail some of the effects on the film, revealing that the murder scene with the gaff upset some of the film’s crew. - ‘Tunes for the Dunes’ (8:13). Michael Minard discusses the production of the score for The Mutilator. - ‘Behind the Scenes Reel’ (16:31). Shot on video, this footage recorded on the set of The Mutilator shows the setting up and filming of some of the film’s effects sequences. - Screen Tests (13:03). Here, we see members of the film’s cast in their recorded screen tests for the picture. - Opening Scene Storyboards (4:27). The hand-drawn storyboards for the film’s opening sequence are here presented with animated transitions and accompanying music. - Trailers and TV Spots. This section includes a trailer (1:42) and TV spot (0:32) for the film’s release as Fall Break, and a trailer (1:57) and TV spots (1:04) for the film’s release as The Mutilator, alongside some radio spots (0:57) for The Mutilator. - Alternate Opening Titles (4:32). Included here are the opening titles for The Mutilator the main presentation carries the Fall Break title). - Music: the film’s main theme, presented in both its vocal (3:30) and instrumental (3:30) variants. - a gallery section, including storyboards for the opening sequence (4:27) and a stills gallery (8:49). Retail copies also include reversible artwork.
Overall
A fun film, with an off-kilter mixture of humour and comedy, The Mutilator is sure to please most fans of the American stalk-and-slash picture. The violence is brutal and the humour incongruous (not to mention that theme song, which is almost as jarring as David Hess’ music for Wes Craven’s Last House on the Left, 1972), but the whole thing has a charm all its own. Arrow’s uncut presentation of the film is very good indeed and contains some absolutely stellar contextual material. Fans of ‘regional’ slasher films will find this to be a must-own release.
 
 
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