By Richard Winters
My Rating: 6 out of 10
4-Word Review: Who is ‘the breather’?
A killer, simply known as ‘the breather’, is stalking students of Lamab High School. His first victims are Julie (Angela Bressler) and her boyfriend Charlie (Keith Singleton). He then proceeds to hack away more students with the police seemingly unable to do anything about it. Fellow student Toby (Kristen Riter) decides to take matters into her own hands by investigating things on her own only to end up getting incriminated as the killer, which forces her to try and convince others that she’s not the one.
This film, like Jekyll and Hyde…Together Again, is the product of the 1980 writer’s strike where Paramount was looking for scripts that could be produced on a modest budget with a nonunion crew in an effort to have some movies released to the theaters while the strike wore on. This was deemed at the time to be a perfect fit as studio heads were impressed with the box office smash Airplane that had come out a year earlier and been a parody of disaster flicks and they were hoping this film would not only cash in on audiences that had liked that one, but also for those who were into slasher films, which at the time were proving to be quite popular. The end result was a modest success with the movie making a $5.2 million profit off of a $510,000 budget. Though it really didn’t obtain its cult following until it began airing on late night cable TV during the 90’s.
While there had been horror movie parodies before those made fun of the standard haunted house theme while this was the first to satirize slasher movies, which up to that point had only been around for a few years. I was though leery as this was written and directed by Mickey Rose, best known as a script collaborator on many of Woody Allen’s movies, but who had ventured on his own to write and direct I Wonder Who’s Killer Her Now? 5 years earlier, which I considered incredibly lame and feared more of the same here. However, to my surprise, this one wasn’t bad, with probably the best moments coming right at the start, which is a perfect send-up of When a Stranger Calls. What makes this one work is that those behind the scenes, including the talented writer Jerry Belson and producer Michael Ritchie, is that they had clearly watched a lot of horror movies and therefore the humor, at least at the beginning, is laser sharp, versus other horror parodies, including Pandemonium, which came out a year later, that seemed to be made by people who really hadn’t watch horror and were just throwing in any dumb gag that they could. The film also has an engaging protagonist, played by Riter who gives a splendid performance and it’s a shame this was her only movie.
Of course there are some detractions. The onscreen titles that flash on every once in a while, get annoying. I didn’t mind it alerting us to the body count, including when Riter kills a fly, which gets considered as a ‘1/2’ a death, but flashing on every time someone leaves a door unlocked, became a bit overdone and heavy-handed. There’s also a few ‘ program interruptions’ like when a spokesman comes on to advise that he must say the work ‘fuck’ in order to get an R-rating as those movies tend to make more money, which while somewhat funny, gives the film too much of a skit-like feel.
The film also lacks any gore or violence even though that was the whole mainstay of slasher movies to begin with. There could’ve been several reasons for this, but I think the main one was that the cultural elites at the time, and I know because I was around then, considered slasher films to be ‘lowbrow’ and onscreen blood effects as ‘tasteless’. The chic argument was that horror movies shouldn’t need gore to be scary and slasher flicks were simply a ‘passing fad’ that would eventually die off into obscurity though 40 years later the exact opposite has happened. Horror movies are now the fastest growing genre and the ‘distasteful’ slasher films of the 80’s are now considered classics. Films like Shaun of the Dead have proven that you can have a lot of blood and guts and still be funny, so this movie misses out and leads to a very boring middle half in which the humor starts to become strained mainly because they run out of ideas, which some funny gore could’ve helped fill-in. It also makes it seem like only half a parody when the main modern horror ingredient, the violence, gets completely glossed over.
Spoiler Alert!
I did though really like the wrap-up, despite Leonard Maltin, who called the ending ‘really bad’. I considered it one of the best aspects especially the dream sequence where Riter goes down the school’s hallway and victims seemingly come back to life and pop-out of the classroom doors. The Wizard of Oz spin in which the characters from the dream, which is basically the entire movie, are shown to have the exact opposite personalities in ‘real-life’ when Riter wakes-up, I found to be quite creative. I got kick out of the Carrie take-off too, which I knew had to be coming at some point, that had Riter’s hand bursts out of the ground after she’s dead. My only quibble here is that, since it was her boyfriend who killed her and he’s the one bending over her grave, there should’ve been a knife in her hand when it comes out of the ground and thus stabbing him in revenge.
My Rating: 6 out of 10
Released: August 7, 1981
Runtime: 1 Hour 25 Minutes
Rated R
Director: Mickey Rose
Studio: Paramount
Available: DVD, Blu-ray, Amazon Video, YouTube
Scopophilia 