This is quite a bizarre movie that features an one legged Norman Bates with a pet crocodile, Robert "Freddy Krueger" Englund as a sex crazed maniac and a man who barks like a dog at this wife and child.
When you have seen plenty of genre movies like this one, there is no way denying that this one is certainly among the better ones. It's a real low budget B-movie that is just plain crazy and cheesy to watch at times. It's story and characters are just totally ridicules and its gore and violence is totally over-the-top. Because of this, this movie also really becomes a pleasant one. Very cheesy but very fun.
It shows how director Tobe Hooper is capable of handling the genre. This was the first movie he did after "The Texas Chain Saw Massacre" and I'm actually quite surprised that this wasn't a more big budget movie. I mean, "The Texas Chain Saw Massacre" was an huge success so why not give Tobe Hooper a chance with a some real good material and money to work with for his next movie? Didn't seemed to bother Hooper much, though since he simply put just as much passion and creativity in this movie as he did with his even more low budget movie "The Texas Chain Saw Massacre", from 3 years earlier.
It's a movie with a very simple story, that above all things also isn't exactly original. But stories very rarely ever matters or makes or breaks a movie like this. It's more often all about the characters that are in it and its gore and violence. Yes, this is a real typical '70's exploitation flick. But let me tell you that the movie is just so totally crazily bizarre at times that it becomes impossible for me not to love this movie. Especially the characters seemed to make actually very little sense. Characters just often pop up into the story but they don't even really seem to serve a significant purpose in it at all. This is for instance the case with the Robert Englund character. Englund was still quite young looking in this movie and he would later go on becoming an horror icon by portraying the Freddy Krueger character in the A Nightmare on Elm Street movies. The movie also features William Finley among others, who I always love for often playing somewhat offbeat quirky characters. He often plays in Brian De Palma movies.
As far as the genre goes, this is one great, crazy, exploitation flick.
8/10
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