By Richard Winters
My Rating: 7 out of 10
4-Word Review: Wanting father to herself.
Julie (Isabelle Mejias) is a possessive daughter with weird interests like having a pet snake in which she enthusiastically feeds it live mice much to the shock of her best friend (Natascha Raybakowski). She also shows an unhealthy affection for her father (Anthony Franciosa) even going as far as fantasizing about making love to him. Because of this she hates her mother (Cindy Girling), so when her mom is attacked one day by the delivery boy (Paul Hubburd) she does not make any attempt to stop it despite having a rifle in her hand. Instead, she watches him crush her mother’s head onto the cement floor, which instantly kills her and then later when he is a part of a line-up at a police station she does not identify him and allows him to go free, but she does this for ulterior reasons. As her father has remarried to Susan (Sybil Danning) causing her jealousy to start all over again and motivating her to ‘hire’ the delivery boy to do what he did to her mother to Susan.
This is a surprisingly inventive story that works for the most part despite the majority of the action taking place in one setting, namely the house, which creates a boring visual. I was a bit taken back why this isn’t better known, or at the very least acquired a small cult following, though the fact that it has very little gore, with the exception of the groin stabbing via a glass bottle, it may have been enough to turn off the horror diehards though if you’re a patient viewer the climax should be rewarding.
Unfortunately, there are some eye-rolling moments as well. The mother’s inability to pick-up on the fact that the delivery guy was coming on to her even after making remarks about her ‘nice figure’, until it was too late didn’t jive with me. I’ve found females are very alert to guys making a pass to them, or ‘flirting’ as it were, so having this woman be completely oblivious, especially when the guy was at the age where you’d expect him to make some moves, proved unrealistic. The father’s relationship with Danning needed better fleshing out. Apparently he was already having a hot-and-heavy- relationship with her without the mother or daughter being aware, which is kind of hard to do, but most of the time the other woman doesn’t want to stay in that position forever and usually pushes the guy to get a divorce, so at the beginning of the movie he shouldn’t have been so conciliatory to the wife’s demands like he is, knowing of course that he already had a ‘spare tire’, and instead used that as an opportunity to request a break-up.
Having Danning move in with the father, and even get married to him, so soon after the wife’s murder should’ve created suspicion with the police chief. Normally the husband is always the initial suspect in these types of investigations especially since the daughter states that she didn’t get a good look at the assailant and could not describe any defining features, which means it could very well have been the husband who did it, or hired someone to do it, in order to get her out of the way and bring his new lover in and the fact that the cops never ever consider this makes them quite inept.
Mejias is badly miscast in the lead. Her moody facial expressions signal right from the start that she’s a psycho nutcase and there’s no character arc, or transition making all of her scenes one-dimensional. What’s worse is that she’s supposedly playing someone who’s 10-to-12, but even with being dressed in clothes for a pre-adolescent she still looks to be at least 16 and in fact was actually 20 at the time of filming. Having an actual age-appropriate child actor in the role with a more angelic face would’ve been far more interesting particularly if she were portrayed as being a ‘good girl’ at first and then had her dark side slowly emerge later.
Despite all this I still found the twists that occur during the final 30-minutes makes up for the most part the other issues. While it’s remained obscure, I feel it has cult potential. Horror fans tired of the same old formula may enjoy its offbeat nature.
Alternate Title: Daughter of Death
My Rating: 7 out of 10
Released: May 21, 1982
Runtime: 1 Hour 30 Minutes
Rated R
Director: Paul Nicholas
Studio: Twin Continental
Available: DVD, Blu-ray, Amazon Video, Roku Channel
Scopophilia 