By Richard Winters
My Rating: 6 out of 10
4-Word Review: Killer in grocery store.
Jennifer (Elizabeth Cox) and Linda (Renee Estevez) are two cashiers working the night shift at a grocery store. Just before closing Jennifer gets confronted by Craig (David Byrnes) a man she dated briefly who pressures her to get back together. When she refuses he becomes irate prompting Linda to alert the store owners (Dan Hicks, Eugene Robert Glazer). The police are eventually called in, but by then Craig has disappeared yet as the night progresses the night crew begins being stalked by some mysterious person that they can’t see. Eventually they start to turn-up dead having been killed in gruesome and novel ways. Is Craig the one behind it, or is it possibly someone else?
The concept is an interesting one as all the action takes place entirely on the grocery store premises with the majority done inside though there’s a few scenes that happen just outside of it. Scott Speigel, who co-wrote Evil Dead II with Sam Raimi, who appears as one of the store employees, got the idea for the film after working as part of the night crew at a Michigan grocery store and in fact ‘Night Crew’ was the movie’s original title, as well as the short film that was shot before they found funding to make a feature length version, but the distributors felt a more generic horror title would help it sell better. It was shot inside a former grocery store that was now empty in Bell, California where they hired a company to deliver two tons of damaged goods in order to use that to line the shelves.
The film is well directed with a lot of unique camera angles including a shot seen through a wine bottle another one where the point-of-view from inside a telephone looking-up and another showing someone from the outside turning a lock on a door and then having the camera shot rotate in tandem to it. The killings, once they finally get going, are adequately grisly and should suffice for gore fans.
While I enjoyed the store setting and felt they did an admirable job in making it appear like a real grocery market I was put-off with the lighting. All grocery stores that I’ve ever been to always are brightly lit in order to give-off this inviting feel and make people want to come inside. This store however was very dark and shadowy looking like no grocery place I’d ever been to and as a result it hurt the believability. Some may argue that this was the night shift and hence no need for all the lights to be on since only the overnight crew was in it, but it was very shadowy from the beginning even before it had closed and customers were still in it. I also didn’t care for the cameo appearances by Aly Moore and Tom Lester, two men who had been cast members in the old ‘Green Acres’ TV-show. Not sure what the relevance was for having them appear here, but they don’t really add much to the story and their bumbling ways don’t help add any tension and if anything detract from it.
The story moves a bit too slowly to the extent I started to worry if the killings were ever going to get going, or if it all was just one of those gimmicky horror flicks that ultimately isn’t very scary, or gory at all. The tension ebbs quite a bit and it would’ve worked better had the killer had some sort of identity, even if it was just wearing a goofy mask, versus having it be someone we never see. The idea that this killer would be able to single-handedly lift someone into the air simply by grabbing the victim’s hair and then proceed to shove them completely through store shelves, or hang them effortlessly on meat hooks, is absurd and makes the culprit seem more like a supernatural entity instead of the human that he is.
Spoiler Alert!
The ultimate reveal where the killer is exposed as being Bill the store’s co-owner was a bit of a surprise, but his motivations didn’t make sense. I could understand that he was upset about the store going out-of-business and would want to kill his partner for allowing it, but why kill all of the employees? If the idea is to ‘save’ the store this isn’t exactly a good way of going about doing it. His explanation that he simply got ‘carried away’ doesn’t suffice. If he really is just ‘crazy’ then elements of his insane personality should’ve come to the surface long before just that night.
Having Jennifer and her former boyfriend Craig, the only two survivors, get arrested for the crimes does have an ironic twist to it, but then leaving everything as a sort-of cliffhanger isn’t satisfying. The original ending was to have the camera go inside Jennifer’s screaming mouth, as she’s protesting her arrest, and down her throat until it got to her heart, which would then be shown as stop beating, but because it would be too complicated to shoot the idea got scrapped, but it would’ve been a cool final shot for sure.
My Rating: 6 out of 10
Released: January 27, 1988
Runtime: 1 Hour 28 Minutes (Unrated Version)
Director: Scott Spiegel
Studio: Empire Pictures
Available: DVD, Blu-ray, Amazon Video, Tubi, Full Moon
Scopophilia 