Posed for Murder 1988

Directed by: Brian Thomas Jones

Starring: Charlotte J. Helmkamp, Laura Flanagan, Charles Kuhune

Review by Luisito Joaquín González

I was crazily in love once, you know? We moved in together and she was so special that I even watched slasher films with her… including Cards of Death. Then she left me for a richer guy and I was stuck with my collection of tatty VHS and a bottle of vodka. Serious. Rumours that I have kidnapped her and she’s locked in the basement with Savage Water on continuous play are totally false and erroneous and I refuse to entertain them. (Ignore those screams btw, the neighbours have a noisy kid…))

Anyway, moving on. Love is a powerful emotion and the perfect motive for a cheesy slasher picture and in Posed for Murder that’s exactly what we have. Now this is a late late entry to the cycle that I really should have posted ages ago, before it got released on DVD. If I had done that, I could have called it an a SLASH above exclusive, because it was incredibly rare. Nowadays though, it can be picked up on Amazon on a shiny disc that includes two other delightful features at a budget cost. Should you click buy it now and add it to your collection? Well allow me to answer that for you in fine detail…

Laura is a topless model and a wannabe scream queen with dozens of sleazy male admirers. Her popularity is not solving her issues however and she’s feeling a little down in the dumps. It certainly not helping matters that a psycho with breathing difficulty is making things tougher for her. Can she find a way to stop the marauding maniac…???

Suspense. Intrigue. Gore. Tension and Terror… are all the things that you won’t find whilst watching Posed for Murder. That’s ok though because the mahoosive amount of liquified cheese that is poured all over the screen instead kind of makes up for that. Well, kind of. I mean, it takes 32 mins for the killer to actually get going, but somehow the picture manages to hold itself together and keep you interested through to the end.

The best way for me to describe the script to you is that it comes across a lot like it was written by someone that speaks English as a second language. Everything is discussed in the most basic of sentence structures and the dialogue literally gets you from A to C without even a hint that B exists. Despite this, director Brian Thomas Jones does an intriguing job of keeping each shot interesting, by setting up distinct backdrops and camera movements. They don’t always work of course, but they help to keep up the level of momentum.

There’s a scene where our final girl has an audition with a pair of seedy filmmakers and I had to wonder if it was included to poke fun at the lead actress. They barely check if she can speak a line of dialogue before they offer her the part and I think that in reality, the procedure for this production was very similar. Why bother worrying if Charlotte Helmkamp can act when she has breasts like pineapples in stockings? In fact these subtle in-jokes became something of an ongoing thing for the rest of the runtime. They can be the only logical explanation as to why her in-film director, Serge La Rue, called her a ‘method actor’. Or what about when her friend asked how she managed to perform with ‘such emotion’. Bwahahaha! Oh how we laughed. It was brilliant. Say what you want about our buxom scream queen, buy you can’t deny that she knows how to take a joke at her own expense. Oh. Oh, ok. Sorry, I didn’t know that she wasn’t let in on that fact…? Oh in that case, I take it all back….

There was one thing though that I actually found quite interesting. Every single guy that she meets, ends up flirting with her and looking down her top. I thought about this and felt how hard it must be for an attractive woman (or guy) when most men always think with head number two. What kind of opinion would you have of the male gender if all that they ever did was hit on you? Is it really like that girls? Man, I need to change my approach.

So there’s not a great deal left to say. The soundtrack sums up all that was bad about eighties music and hums along over shots of spandex bound jocks working out in a gymnasium. This activity breaks up the ‘intense drama’ of our cycolina’s quest to discover the identity of the psycho maniac. Thinking about it, I guess that this could be a slasher sister of kind to Killer Workout in that sense. Chuck in a handful of diluted killings and a twist that turns out to be exactly what you thought it was all along and what you have is a fondue festival that’s cunningly disguised as a DVD. In other words, if you like ’em trashy you should give this a whirl. Just don’t bring your brain.

…Oh and about my ex-fianceé and her being locked in the cellar… I was actually joking about all that. It was four years ago now and I was lucky enough to meet my soul mate (Hi Żaneta xx) and I’m on my way to see her now. Damn. Where did I put the key to the padlock on the door to the basement…? 😉

Slasher Trappings:

Killer Guise:

Gore: √√

Final Girl: √√√

RATING: