As a slasher this movie really fall short. The movie kept me constantly waiting for something that just never happened. The movie feels like one big build-up to nothing.
It will really be the horror-fans that will be most disappointed and displeased with this movie. There are not enough killings or other defining genre moments in it and besides when the killings do occur it feels very sloppy and the blood and gore is disappointing. In my opinion the killer seems more like a slapstick character at times.
The movie makes some wrong and uninteresting choices with its build-up. The character development just feels uninteresting and also unnecessary. What you want from a slasher are some killings and preferably some gore and creativity to go along with it all. This movie just keeps building up and developing. It plays on the idea of presenting as many different character in this movie as possible, who potentially could turn out to be the killer. Of course nothing wrong with this idea and it gets used quite a lot but when nothing is happening you just couldn't care any less for who will turn out to be the killer. The movie just never gets tense or scary. Think you can blame inexperienced director Paul Lynch for just not handling the genre very well.
It's an early '80's movie, that in its style foremost still feels like an '70's flick. It uses some fancy editing and there were some nice moments in it, which kept the movie going. The movie unfortunately also prominently features some disco music and some disco moves from all of the cast members. The kind of moves that are just too embarrassing to look at now days.
The story also feels quite messy, aside from the fact that it just isn't a very interesting or even remotely original one. Lots of the characters just feel very random and only seem to be put in the movie to serve as potentially suspects for the killer role. I just don't get it for instance what the roles of the cops are in this movie. They are lurking around everywhere all the time but doing nothing at all.
But well, it still has scream-queen Jamie Lee Curtis in it, so how bad can it actually be, you might think. It really is an irrelevant fact that Jamie Lee Curtis is in this though. She gets nothing interesting to do. Same goes for Leslie Nielsen and all of the other actors in it. Nielsen probably still gives the best performance out of the entire movie and it made me wish he was more in it. It made me wish as well that he made less comedies and played more serious roles throughout his career.
A disappointing and just mainly very uninteresting slasher.
5/10
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