By 1982 the slasher movie craze that had commenced four years earlier (with HALLOWEEN) was familiar enough that its conventions were satirized, AIRPLANE! (1980) like, in STUDENT BODIES (1981), PANDEMONIUM (1982) and WACKO (1982). The latter film, from producer/director Greydon Clark (BLACK SHAMPOO, WITHOUT WARNING), takes place, appropriately, on Halloween, and is most notable for a cast that includes almost-big names like Joe Don Baker (WALKING TALL), Stella Stevens (THE POSEIDON ADVENTURE), Julia Duffy (NEWHEART), Andrew Clay (before he became Dice), Charles Napier (THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS) and Sonny Davis (FAST TIMES AT RIDGEMONT HIGH, LAST NIGHT AT THE ALAMO).
The film, as was typical in 1982 (the year of ZAPPED!, a kids’ movie that underwent extensive reshoots to garner an R rating), initially garnered a PG rating, but after a disastrous theatrical run it got rereleased with a great deal of excised footage reinserted. Hence the R rated cut that was released by Vinegar Syndrome on Blu-ray in 2019, and which is now WACKO’s standard version.
There’s a “Pumpkin Headed Lawnmower Killer,” so named because this guy likes running a lawnmower over his victims while playing Charles Gounod’s “Funeral March of A Marionette” (a.k.a. the theme from ALFRED HITCHCOCK PRESENTS), on the loose. Proclaiming “Death to all teenagers who fuck!,” he offs Pam (Claudia Lonow), the older sister of young Mary Graves, at a drive-in theater. Thirteen years later, the teenaged Mary (Julie Duffy), who attends Alfred Hitchcock High School (where “Hitchcock’s Birds” are set to play against “De Palma’s Knifes”), is looking forward to losing her virginity to her jock boyfriend Norman Bates (Scott McGinnis), who totes around his late mother’s skeleton, while her pervert father (George Kennedy) spies on her through the bedroom window. Detective Dick Harbinger (Joe Don Baker), meanwhile, becomes convinced the Pumpkin Headed Lawnmower Miller has recommenced his rampage.
He’s not wrong, as Mary’s mom (Stella Stevens) learns when she finds a bloody lawnmower tossed through her living room window, with a note attached to it reading “Don’t go into space because no one will her you scream.” This doesn’t stop Mary from heading to her school’s Halloween Pumpkin Prom, where the killer happens to be on the loose.
In addition to all this silliness, there’s some gratuitous vehicular mayhem to remind us of Greydon Clark’s action movie bonafides, and a brief song and dance led by Mr. Clay. There’s also a more creative-than-expected end credits sequence, with a casting call upon which Joe Don Baker provides indirect commentary (muttering imprecations like “Nitwit,” “Bonehead” and “Nimrod” as the actors are identified onscreen).
The gags, which hit all the expected targets—PSYCHO, THE EXORCIST, THE OMEN, FRIDAY THE 13th, CARRIE, etc.—come in many forms, few of them funny. Much is made of Detective Dick Harbinger’s first name (“Can I be frank, Dick?”) and the penis humor extends (so to speak) to Clay’s character, who’s named Tony Schlongini. The ZAZ boys (referring to AIRPLANE!’s writer-directors David Zuker, Jerry Zucker and Jim Abrahams) Greydon Clark wasn’t, encouraging his actors to go full ham and confusing comedy (in the R rated cut, at least) with the type of sexploitation in which he specialized, with a close-up of a syringe stabbing a vein and protracted depictions of female pulchritude muddying the comedic waters.
To be fair, the gags, unfunny though most of them are, occasionally hit their mark, as in Mary’s claim, before venturing out alone, that “You think I’m afraid just because it’s Halloween, and prom night, and a psycho loose, and pitch black outside, and I’m carrying around childhood imagers that are bound to screw me up for the rest of my life?” That’s a good question, and one many a slasher movie heroine would have done well to ask herself.
Vital Statistics
WACKO
Greydon Clark Productions
Director/Producer: Greydon Clark
Screenplay: Dana Olsen, Michael Spound, M. James Kouf, Jr., David Greenwalt
Cinematography: Nicholas J. von Sternberg
Editing: Earl Watson, Curtis Burch
Cast: Joe Don Baker, Stella Stevens, George Kennedy, Julia Duffy, Scott McGinnis, Elizabeth Daily, Andrew Dice Clay, Michele Tobin, Anthony James, David Drucker, Sonny Davis, Charles Napier, Jeff Altman, Michael Lee Gogin, Claudia Lonow, Tamar Howard, Victor Brandt, Will Albert, Darby Hinton, Jacqulin Cole