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Common sense could have prevented the bloodbath…but isn’t that how it usually works in a slasher flick?
The Roofer was released on February 22nd, 1991, long after the glory days of slasher flicks, and years before Scream made the genre popular again. The unpopular Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare would come out in September of that year, and two years later Jason Voorhees would return in Jason Goes To Hell: The Final Friday—the second Friday the 13th film to lie about being the last one. The major franchises were still around, but audiences certainly weren’t flocking to them as they had in the past.
In the original Night of the Living Dead, and god it pains me to have to clarify which version I mean, Duane Jones needed pre-drilled holes in the boards he was nailing over the windows. But the guy still, y’know, successfully conveyed the illusion that he was nailing boards.
Not only did they look like the most inept group of roofers ever, but I was worried that one of the actors would accidentally hammer a nail right through his hand. So we decided that they would just pound the hammers without actually nailing anything in, which looks ridiculous but at least didn’t give anybody tetanus.”
As they hammer shingles, they discuss a major rule of roofing: if you’re falling, do not grab anything, especially the gutter, to try to keep yourself from plummeting over the edge. It won’t save you, and you’ll just force your co-workers to redo the work.
He’s still covered in blood, and the conversation with his next-door neighbor is some of the most misplaced comic relief since the idiotic police officers in the original Last House on the Left.
There’s no Final Girl, or even a Final Guy, and it’s very rare for a slasher flick to introduce all new victims in the third act. Typically they’re all set up at the beginning and then we watch them die one by one.
No, “Oh my God, Kevin Bacon is in this?” (Friday the 13th) “Johnny Depp is in this?” (A Nightmare on Elm Street) “Fisher Stevens is in this?” (The Burning) “Jennifer Aniston is in this?” (Leprechaun) “Charlize Theron is in this?” (Children of the Corn III: Urban Harvest) “Naomi Watts is in this?” (Children of the Corn IV: The Gathering)
When he reached the point where he was far too drunk to safely get behind the wheel of an automobile, he left the house and got behind the wheel of his automobile.
What he should have done is stay calm, very carefully pry out the nail, climb back down the ladder, and seek immediate medical attention. What he did was scream and yank his hand away, leaving a not-insignificant amount of flesh attached to the nail. Then he lost his balance on the wet roof, slid down it, and fell over the edge. He landed on the rocking chair on their front deck. Instead of this being an amusing slapstick moment, he broke his neck and died instantly, blood streaming out of his mouth.
This messed up Pike Green in a big way. He did not enjoy having the details of his open-minded mother’s sex life go public. He went from an introverted, socially awkward, mildly creepy teenager to an almost mute, socially hopeless, extremely creepy one. He didn’t improve much with age.
Danny wanted to live alone because he was a serial killer.
Murdering ten people in a movie theater would be extremely difficult.
REPORTER: But you dared me to slam a hatchet into the head of an audience member. BLOOMINGTON: I think we can both agree that this interview has gone completely off the rails. Can we edit all of this out? REPORTER: We’re live. BLOOMINGTON: Fuck. REPORTER: And now we’re getting fined.
It wasn’t fair! The twentieth anniversary screening of The Roofer was going to be synonymous with the name of Rosa McGiven and not Danny Tantor!
“My intention was to kill that motherfucker. Two or three more hits would have done it. But I suddenly realized that if you hadn’t seen the whole thing, it might not be clear who was the bad guy and who was the good guy. I didn’t want to get shot by a security guard. That would’ve really sucked.”
Under normal circumstances, you couldn’t wheel ten corpses out onto the side of a city street with a line of people right there watching what you were doing and get away with it. Somebody would say, “Hey, what’s that guy doing with all of those corpses?” and the jig would be up. There were remarkably few scenarios where one could do something like that and be allowed to drive away undisturbed.
I do think that without three psychopaths being in the audience, it would have been a really fun event and everybody would’ve gone home happy, but the psychopaths were there and that’s just the way it is.”
