John Hinckley, Jr., unsuccessfully attempted to assassinate Ronald Reagan on March 30, 1981. The Last Horror Film pretends that that year’s Cannes Film Festival was happening at around the same time and not in May, and that it would be feasible for a popular slasher-movie star to be the frontrunner among the festival’s Best Actress award nominees. Isabelle Adjani, who won in real life for her performances in Quintet and Possession, in The Last Horror Film is no match for Jana Bates (Caroline Munro), who wears her hair in a skunky black and white legions of young female fans often duplicate and, of late, has become the obsession of a cab driver who lives with his mother in New York City named Vinny Durand (Joe Spinell).
It’s a little like how it had been with Hinckley and Jodie Foster, only Durand’s intentions are more cinematic. He dreams of becoming a horror filmmaker, and wants Bates to headline his debut project. He figures the best way to coax her into working with him is by accosting her someplace at Cannes, where she is promoting a movie called Scream. The thing is that whether Bates agrees to star in the barely mapped-out project Durand has in mind doesn’t actually matter. From the moment he’s stepping onto the French Riviera, she’s already been “cast” as a sort of real-life final girl where Durand, a classic mad-slasher type, starts gruesomely killing those close to her, capturing his work on camera. He starts with the silver-haired and fake-tanned husband (Glenn Jacobson) who predicts with a laugh that “it’s going to be an interesting festival” after Durand sends him a threatening note with a straight razor attached to it. He gets more homicidally confident from there.
Released a year after the start of the festival season it’s set in, The Last Horror Film keeps things tongue in cheek. Between the killings it attends press conferences where the societal influence of horror is discussed with a basically out-in-the-open eye roll, and screenings of other horror films where the kinds of murders that typically would open a movie always seem to appear right at the end and win the approval of refined audiences who in our actual reality would never be watching this stuff. I couldn’t guess whether director David Winters, who also wrote the movie with Judd Hamilton and Tom Klassen, was laughing to himself at the idea of a parallel universe where Cannes judges really think Caroline Munro, so popular she can’t even step out of her car without getting swarmed, is up to par with the likes of Adjani and Isabelle Huppert. I’d like to think he’s having a little fun, like we are watching the movie, with the prospect, just like how the film seems tickled at the preposterous idea of the horror genre being such a defining part of its alternate universe’s Cannes.
The Last Horror Film is more amusing than it is funny. It’s appositely also more “scary” than it is scary, though its locations are used effectively to feel more ominous in the many unknowns they pose to someone not only foreign to the area but also the object of a one-track minded killer. Munro and Spinell, as they’re wont to do, don’t give us more than they need to in their performances. But there’s a meta flourish to their casting that gives their work an extra kick. Munro too in life saw her glamour and beauty inextricable from horror — a genre to which her looks and limited acting ability was welcoming — and Spinell, though not actually a sweaty creep as far as I know, tended to always be seen as one by the public watching his movies. Spinell and Munro had previously starred in the grimier, more frightening Maniac (1980), where they live up to the kind of typecasting that followed them throughout their careers. The Last Horror Film gives them an opportunity to wink and nudge.
Peterson Reviews 