(1981)
Dir - Tobe Hooper
Overall: WOOF
After closing out the 70s with the Salem's Lot miniseries, Tobe Hooper returned to the dingy, hillbilly horror themes of his seminal The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and rather lackluster follow-up Eaten Alive with the even more abysmal The Funhouse, (Carnival of Terror). The most paramount problem is that despite a few southern accents and some lunatic family loyalty rhetoric, all other semblance of the gritty, wildly unsettling guerilla-style horror displayed in Hooper's 1974 masterpiece are completely replaced by slasher-by-numbers nonsense. While it could be seen as unfair to continuously compare all of the director's future work to what he accomplished with Chainsaw, it really becomes remarkable and rather sad how utterly far off the mark nearly all of his other films stem from what he helped revolutionize. Here, unsympathetic, dipshit "teenagers" are horny and naked, a grunting, howling creep in a mask is after them, cat and mouse shenanigans ensue, the killers keep being dead then not being dead, the final girl is established from the very first scene, and it could not be more catastrophically boring if it tried. The set up is way too long and the pay off way too little. The amount of slasher films that adhered so strictly to this formula simply gets unforgivable after awhile and considering that this came out the same year about a billion others did, was followed by about a billion more, and Hooper was so blandly at the helm, it is just a regrettable snore through and through.
THE HITCHER
(1986)
Dir - Robert Harmon
Overall: MEH
If road horror was a thing, its quintessential poster boy would probably be The Hitcher. Written by Eric Red, (Near Dark) and directed by Robert Harmon, (about forty-seven Jesse Stone movies with Tom Selleck), it has got an intense enough premise at least of a homicidal maniac consistently ruining a guy's day that kicked him out of his car while hitchhiking. Suspension of disbelief is stretched quite a bit beyond what is commonly excepted though. While Rutger Hauer made a dandy career for himself playing villains and he is effortlessly sinister here, the way he manages to be ten steps ahead of C. Thomas Howell gets a bit silly after awhile, not to mention kind of annoying. Then again, the movie would probably only be about twenty minutes otherwise and Howell was all about not getting a break in 1986 as that lovable, coming of age comedy Soul Man that aged ever so well also came out the same year. The film switches from a tense thriller to a shoot em up, on the run action movie in its last act, but Harmon maintains a formidable pace the whole way through. Regrettably, the improbable moments continue to mount up dramatically towards the finish line in a laughable way. If it threw caution to the wind and was just a knowingly ridiculous 80s action movie, it might get away with such things, but the grim tone in effect actually works against itself in this setting. The committed performances nearly save it, but it misses the mark in too many essential areas.
(1988)
Dir - Kevin S. Tenney
Overall: MEH
Night of the Cliche...I mean, Night of the Demons is one of the many thoroughly unapologetic 80s horror movies that not only plays to every beat it is expected to, but does so with a consistent nod and a wink towards its audience. As the second feature from Kevin S. Tenney, (who has made a career for himself exclusively making B-grade, direct to video horror movies), this one has endured as well as any, spawning a few sequels and a remake; something that is just as predictable as anything in the actual movie. With deliberately genre-pandering horror comedies, it works well when delivering on the necessary components for both camps. While Night of the Demons is certainly gory and relentlessly stupid, it drops the ball with its detrimentally slow boil and hackneyed approach. Fun stuff does start happening, but it starts happening past the halfway point. Up until then we spend eons getting to know too many characters no one should ever get to know. Right out of the gate, every male present is the most obnoxiously horny, pushing-thirty looking douchebage and for the most part the women are just as vapid if not more so, sans the clear, goody two shoes final girl and son of a preacher dude who is the only guy present that is not simply a terribly unfunny, wisecracking hard-on with clothes. It plays its cards way too straight, becoming less of a parody and more of a groan-worthy laundry list of annoying and played out Evil Dead-inspired tropes.
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