By Richard Winters
My Rating: 1 out of 10
4-Word Review: Mental patient stalks sorority.
Due to the similarities in their names a mute mental patient named Howard Johns (Solly Marx) gets accidently released from a psychiatric hospital and returns to the scene of his crime, a college sorority, whose members he slaughtered years before. Dr. Joan Gillmore (Belinda Montgomery) tries to track him down, but finds no help from the staff at the hospital who are more concerned in covering up the error to the extent that they secretly send out two thugs (Dennis Helfend, Philip Levy) to kill Joan so she won’t be able to tell anyone else about it.
It’s hard to tell if this movie wants to be a conventional slasher flick or a parody and the cartoon like opening theme music makes it sound like it’s going for the latter. Either way it’s a one-dimensional, low grade, monotonous excuse of a film that essentially has nothing going for it even when compared to other entries from the genre. Supposedly it was made to cash in on the 3-D craze, but there’s not enough action to justify it. There’s a killing at the start, but the middle drags on with Joan’s plodding investigation as to the whereabouts of the killer that the viewer already knows the answer to and watching these cardboard characters spend 80 minutes coming to the same conclusion that we know from the start is extremely boring to say the least.
This is the type of cheap crap that needs to be approached with tongue firmly in cheek, but Montgomery plays it too earnestly acting like she’s in a serious drama, which just helps to make it more intolerable. The killer is equally dull and for that matter really isn’t scary. I felt that the only reason the character was made to be a mute was because the actor who played him was a stunt coordinator with limited acting experience and therefore the less he had to say the better.
The only bright spot is the presence of Viveca Lindfors a talented and aging star whose career peak was in the 40’s, but who still manages to give this second-rate material here an admirable effort. Unfortunately she appears for only about 5 minutes as the sorority house mother, but then later becomes an integral part to the film’s twist ending, which was enough to earn this thing a measly point.
My Rating: 1 out of 10
Released: October 26, 1984
Runtime: 1Hour 27Minutes
Rated R
Director: Simon Nuchtern
Studio: Almi Pictures
Available: DVD
Scopophilia 