On the surface level this movie is a generic 80’s slasher movie about a psycho who hunts and murders teens, but scratch the surface and this movie is much weirder and more surprising than it seems.

The film follows Trish, played by Michelle Michaels, a popular highs school girl who invites a group of girlfriends over for a slumber party. The night turns to horror when escaped murderer Russ Thorn, played by Michael Villella, begins stalking and murdering the girls with a power drill equipped with a two foot long drill bit.

My initial impressions of the film were that it was an obvious rip off of the John Carpenter film Halloween. The escaped murderer stalking teens? Come on, we’ve seen this before.

My second thought was that this is the exact movie that Brian De Palma is always spoofing in his films of the 80’s. The opening of his excellent film Blow Out is completely satirizing this movie and its ilk. The POV of the killer stalking sexy naked girls, gratuitous nudity, and overly phallic murder weapons being wielded against helpless screaming victims. I rolled my eyes multiple times in this movie.

My third thought was that it was much better shot than it had any right to be. The cinematography was much more interesting and well executed than I ever expected it to be. The camera moved with a fluid creeping quality that felt eerie and suspenseful. The shots were composed in really intelligent and interesting ways to communicate information to the audience but withhold information from the characters. For example, the camera shows the killer hidden in the foreground while the characters are unable to see him creating suspense for the viewer.

The nudity is also shot in the same manner that Brian De Palma shot nudity. He was always trying to deconstruct the genre and deconstruct the filmmaking process while you were watching it. He drew attention to the artificiality of the films he was making while drawing deeper into that artifice. This movie plays a similar trick. The nudity is gratuitous and obvious and almost forces the viewer to confront the tropes of the genre while participating in those tropes.

The final thing that really stood out to me was how well executed the jump scares were. There are a lot of them in this movie, but they are well executed and caused genuine surprise. The movie did not have to work this hard to make the viewer jump, but they did. They went the extra mile to infuse the film with good jolts.

I looked up the film after watching it, and was surprised to discover that it was written by a woman. Not only a woman, but Rita Mae Brown, a feminist poet and author most well known for her novel Rubyfruit Jungle and her involvement with the Women’s Liberation Movement.

Why did she write a slasher movie about nubile teens being murdered by a madman with a giant drill bit? She wrote it as a satire. The script for this movie is a spoof of the genre. She was making fun of these tropes and cliches and the roles women were given in these movies. The studio that bought the screenplay forced the director to play it seriously. Scrap the comedy and play it straight.

The director they chose? Amy Holden Jones, the woman who would go on to write Mystic Pizza and Indecent Proposal. She crafted real jump scares and real tension, while keeping the scripts winking satire and self aware qualities in tact yet tucked just beneath the surface. She is the reason the cinematography is so intelligent and the nudity is shot with a deconstructionist lens rather than a lurid pervy one.

I was wonderfully surprised by this movie. I went in expecting trash and got a fully surprising and unique experience. This is one of the man y reasons why I love the horror genre. A movie that looks like obvious dreck can be a completely different kind of movie. A movie that has all the earmarks of being a masterpiece can turn out to be a boring mess. I love being surprised and challenged by movies and this one challenged all of my assumptions. I’m hoping to see more of these in the future.

It was my cup of tea A-