Director: Jeff Lieberman
Year: 1977
Country: USA
Alternate Titles: N/A
Genre: Slasher
Plot:
Wrongly convicted of murdering his friends, a man sets out to find the truth and learns that a group of friends who took a tainted batch of drugs are responsible for the deaths and tries to stop their rampage before he gets caught by the police.
Review:
This here turned out to be quite an excruciating, and at times, barely-passable horror effort. One of the biggest issues with that is the fact that the majority of the film plays off as an investigation movie into the mysterious habits of the murderer who had already struck and was himself put down earlier in the movie, so that means very little screen-time is spent on the lead actually being in danger throughout. It's around a half-hour between the last attack at the party and the second scene where the next victim comes into play, and then it's another twenty-plus minutes again after that before we get to the finale so there's so much searching going on that it really takes a toll on where this one gets its scares from since it's all about who's infected and who isn't, but yet it does nothing to assure that the hero is in any danger throughout by not having others out there just like it.
Overall, this creates an immensely plodding, boring film that doesn't have much of anything going on here until we get to the three big scenes in this which are the attack at the cabin, the mother's sudden turn, and the final stalking in the department store. Each of these are great fun for their own individual reasons, as the cabin attack is far more gruesome and intense than anything else in here which results in quite a jolt, the mother's attack is based on a continuing storyline that gets paid off nicely, and the finale in the store is just a good-old-fashioned stalking scene in a massive layout with plenty of room to hide and sneak attack on the victims. These here save it, but it's still not as good as it should've been.
Overview: **/5
A disappointing and barely worthwhile effort with a lot of issues, this one features a few positive aspects but has more flaws going for it which cause it to be a generally underwhelming effort. Viewers who are more tolerant of this style and approach might enjoy this one the most, but most others out there who aren't into these aspects or are turned off by the flaws will need to heed caution here.
This review was originally published as part of our coverage of the 2022 edition of the Fantasia International Film Festival. Click the banner below for all of our coverage of the festival:
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