Director: Tobe Hooper
Cast: Elizabeth Berridge, Cooper Huckabee, William Finley, Kevin Conway
Have I Seen It Before: No. Somewhere along the line it had been recommended to me as a potential Beyond the Cabin in the Woods movie. I don’t remember how it came to me, whether we discussed it off-mic among the panel, whether somebody mentioned it to me, or it was (improbably) recommended in an old episode by either Siskel or Ebert*. We’ve got a rule on the show that I have to, you know… actually see the film in question before I recommend it for the show.
Did I Like It: Not really. It’s probably best that I can’t for the life of me remember who recommended it, as I can now think almost anybody made the recommendation**. It’s not as brazenly cheap and sleazy as Friday the 13th (1980) or any of its sequels. It’s nowhere near as classy as even some of the worst sequels for Halloween (1978). It does try to be visually interesting in its banal exploration of 80s horror, which might put it in the same pantheon of A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), or any of its better sequels, but it doesn’t quite measure up in that regard, either. Its opening minutes reach for something approaching meta horror, but the entire sequence only left me wondering why the parents wouldn’t let Joey (Shawn Carson) stay up to watch the end of Bride of Frankenstein (1935) when he is demonstrably a fan. No wonder he left the house.
I suppose it’s interesting to see the progress of a filmmaker. This doesn’t have the relentless discomfort of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974). It’s not hard to draw a line from Hooper’s explosive introduction to the movie world, to this, to Poltergeist (1982), where people are still trying to work out whether he was at all up to directing the film in the first place.
*As I look into info for the film it turns out that it was indeed a Siskel—yes, you read that right—liked it quite a bit. Sometimes I can’t quite account for much in the world.
**Pay no attention to the man behind the footnotes. I had started writing that sentence before tripping over that little Siskel nugget. A Sugget, if you will. (You shouldn’t.)