Intruder (1989)

... aka: Bloodnight
... aka: Night Crew, The
... aka: Night Crew: The Final Checkout
... aka: Night of the Intruder

Directed by:
Scott Spiegel

For its inaugural release, Paramount re-titled what was originally called The Night Crew to the more generic-sounding Intruder because they felt the name would appeal more to slasher movie fans. They then turned right around and hit those same slasher fans where it hurt the most by eliminating nearly all of the gore (over five minutes worth) to get an R rating while refusing to release an uncut alternative. Talk about contempt for your target audience! However, none of that should come as a surprise considering how the same studio treated their long-running Friday the 13th series, which ended up receiving more pre-release cuts than all Jason's victims combined. Still, it's hard to really blame Paramount. After all, they simply had product to market and sell and knew that being slapped with an "X" rating or "unrated" label would kill a film's full earning potential. The real culprits were that horrible moralist Jack Valenti and his corrupt MPAA, who showed considerable, hypocritical bias against not only horror films but independent films of all stripes, yet played favorites with the top brass in Hollywood. People like Steven Spielberg could pack as much violence and adult content into their films as they wanted and manage to skim by with whatever rating they wanted, while low-budget filmmakers were picked on and made examples of. Intruder is just one of many genre films to receive this kind of 'bastard stepchild' treatment in the 80s and 90s. Unfair as all that is, this is still simply not a very good movie, even in its uncut form.

In keeping with slasher tradition, the "plot" - psycho starts killing employees of a grocery store after hours - is as simplistic and thin as can be. A major suspect (i.e. obvious red herring) in established early on in Craig (David Byrnes), who we know is a bad guy because he's wearing a leather jacket and doesn't shave. Craig had drug problems in the past, spent a year in prison for killing someone (just a year?!) and now seems to be stalking his ex- girlfriend Jennifer (Elizabeth Cox), who works as a cashier at the Walnut Creek Market. The other major suspects are, well, pretty much everyone else who works there. Owner Danny (Eugene Robert Glazer) has sold the store to the city and plans on shutting the doors permanently in a week, which doesn't sit well with co-owner Bill (Danny Hicks) or the rest of the staff. Not that it really matters one way or another as the identity of the killer and their motive turns out to be as obvious and ridiculous as can be. However, the primary audience won't be tuning in for the story, they'll be tuning in for the gore. This provides at least that much in its unaltered form.

For your money, you get knives sunk into chests and heads, a hook through a jaw, an eye-skewering, a head crushed by a hydraulic press, severed limbs all over the place and, most gruesomely of all, a head sawed in half with a band saw. Some of the fx are well-executed by KNB, while others look rather rubbery, but they're fun all the same. Unfortunately, it takes more than a copious amount of fake blood and latex to make a good horror film and literally everything else about this one is poorly done. Next to nothing happens in the entire boring first half, the acting is terrible, the characters are annoying and not the least bit engaging, the music score (some of which was actually recycled from other films) is God awful, the attempts at comic relief are embarrassing, the editing is truly abysmal, the film lacks a proper ending and the makers are completely unable to generate any tension, suspense or excitement at any point in the film. Hell, they aren't even able to capture a basic sense of fun.

Worst of all perhaps is the direction and camera-work. Spiegel thinks he's being clever and original by shooting through a cardboard cut-out of a rotary phone, putting a camera in a shopping cart and wheeling it around, placing the camera underneath a character while they are sweeping the floor and constantly shooting reflections and weird angles through bottles, water tanks and windows, but all he accomplishes by doing this is destroying the flow of the film and taking viewers completely out of the story. While these silly shots are sporadically effective (there are a few good scene transitions that admittedly work well), they're done at such an overkill level this looks less like a movie than it does the work of some freshman film student attempting to show off. It also does nothing to distract from all of the other areas where this film fails.

Gotta say, I was expecting better from this one, especially considering its current 6.3 rating on IMDb and all the glowing reviews its received from genre publications and websites over the years. The minor and, quite frankly, completely undeserved cult following it's acquired I can only attribute to two things: 1. High anticipation for the uncut (i.e. non-butchered) version, which took seemingly forever to get a release here in America, and 2. Fan boys who've made themselves believe this has to be better than most others of its type (it's not) just because Spiegel, Sam Raimi and a few other Evil Dead alumni (Hicks, KNB, Ted Raimi) were involved. Bruce Campbell even shows up briefly at the very end as a police officer but is given nothing to do, despite his star billing on the DVD cover. 

Renee Estevez, Alvy Moore, Emil Sitka and fx man Greg Nicotero all have small roles, as do future Hollywood successes Burr Steers, who went on to make the acclaimed indy film Igby Goes Down (2003) and then squander his talents with Zac Efron movies, and three-time Oscar nominee Lawrence Bender, who went on to become a top Hollywood producer best known for his work with Quentin Tarantino. Pointing out the Evil Dead connections was always the major selling point for the film, but the latest releases can now boast it's "from the producer of Inglorious Basterds and Pulp Fiction." Too bad the film has never been able to stand on its own merits. Charles Band was the uncredited executive producer and put up much of the 130,000 budget.

★★

Blood Lake (1987)

Directed by:
Tim Boggs

The VHS box promises us "a blood bath of horror!" This not only doesn't deliver on that, but it also doesn't deliver a film in the traditional sense of the word. This thing actually reminds me a lot of the videos I and a small group of friends used to shoot after school in the early 90s. We always used my grandmother's VHS camcorder, which I was only able to get my hands on under the guise of doing "school projects." We'd set the camera down on a tripod, pop a tape in, then sit around a table and ad lib our way through a "plot" we just made up as we went along. We had no idea what the word "continuity" meant, constantly talked over one another because there was no script and thought we were hilarious and cool because we cursed and talked about sex a lot. Many scenes ended with one of us saying something like "Hey, I've gotta use the bathroom!" or "Is that the phone ringing?" and then getting up and walking right past the camera so we could turn it off because there was no one else around to do it. And since we loved horror flicks, each video - regardless of what we'd been talking about earlier - ended with a killer murdering everyone with the biggest knife we could find in the kitchen or whatever gardening tools we could find at the farm we often filmed at as someone squirted ketchup all over the place.

I only mention my own dumb little childhood videos above because that's the same level of professionalism you'll find in this regional production from Oklahoma, which has the same plot, production values, acting talent and makeup fx as the videos I was making as a 10 year old. The only real differences are that we didn't have a second rate hair band ("Voyager") to do songs for us, didn't torture the world at large by getting our home movies into video stores and, when we filmed outside at night, we actually set up lights so you could at least see what was going on. Aside from that, this is virtually the same thing. At first, I was feeling nostalgic and amused by the terrible acting, awful clothes, twangy Midwest accents and just how lame the whole thing was. Unfortunately, that feeling lasted all of five minutes before boredom set in and then I just couldn't wait to be put out of my misery. There are generally two types of bad horror movies: bizarrely inept and entertaining ones that often acquire cult followings and ones that are just tedious, amateurish, forgettable, derivative and utterly boring. This falls completely into that second category.

There's not much plot here to speak of, but for the record... Two hick couples - Mike (Doug Barry) and Becky (Angela Darter) & Bryan (Mike Kaufman) and Kim (Andrea Adsms) - as well as a 'tween' couple - Mike's kid brother Tony (Travis Krassner) and Susan (Christie Willoughby) - who look to be about 10-11 years old, go to Becky's parents lakeside house for a three day weekend. While there, they sit around and talk endlessly about nothing in particular, drink beer, smoke weed, go water skiing for what feels like an eternity and play quarters for, you guessed it, what feels like an eternity. All the while, a 280 lb. "uglier than hell" psycho named Jed (Tiny Frazier), whose motive for killing is about the lamest ever conceived for one of these things, stalks around preparing to slaughter everyone. Unfortunately, it takes him about an hour to kill a few people in scenes that are too dark to even see.

Just to give you a general idea of this film's lameness I will discuss one scene in particular. A couple of neighborhood boys who've been hanging out with the main teens end up getting murdered after a night of partying. The next morning, some old guy wearing a flannel shirt, a cowboy hat and jeans (their neighbor?) knocks on the door, takes one of the guys outside and nonchalantly shows him the boys' corpses just lying around in the front yard. The guy then says in a monotone voice "I'll be up at the house if you need anything" and goes back inside. Not only do we never see any cops actually at the scene but the teens refuse to leave and, later that night, one of the couples goes outside to have sex in a boat just a few feet from where one of the bodies were found. I suppose that's really not any dumber than what you'll see in many other slasher flicks, but this one doesn't even have nudity, gore or adequate production values as compensation for the moronic writing. The editing, lighting, videography, audio recording (which is often inaudible) and everything else is absolutely terrible.

This was shot around Cedar Lake, Oklahoma, which dried up soon after this wrapped production. Taking advantage of the situation, the filmmakers then tacked-on an end scene of the killer's ghost standing around the dried-up lake bed.

Despite what some say, this film wasn't really all that rare during the 80s / 90s video craze; at least not on the East Coast. The distributor was United Home Video, who also released the shot-on- video films Blood Cult (1985), The Ripper (1985) starring Tom Savini, Revenge (1986) starring John Carradine and THE LAST SLUMBER PARTY (1988). All of those, as well as this one, were in nearly every video store I visited as a kid in the six different states I lived in growing up. Though the box says it runs 90 minutes and IMDb claims 82, the full running time is just 76 minutes. There's no DVD and I doubt it's on anyone's high list of priorities for a major release.

NO STARS!