Director: Monte Hellman
Year: 1989
Country: USA
Alternate Titles: N/A
Genre: Slasher
Plot:
Hoping to rest for the holidays, a blind psychic woman and her friends' trip to a family gathering is interrupted by the reanimated killer that was part of her experiments due to his involvement in several rampages in the past and tries to stop him before he kills off her friends.
Review:
This was a truly abysmal and nearly worthless slasher effort. The only positive this one has is the finale stalking around the house, which is quite effective here at putting her in danger due to the use of her physical condition causing a lot of fumbling and stumbling around in the dark while trying to avoid the killer who's closing in, through several different floors of the house and down into the basement where the real stalking is used and the best bloodletting is all thrown together. By itself, it's a decent enough sequence but is just trapped all throughout here with the rest of the banal attributes that hold it down.
Among the numerous flaws here, nothing is bigger than the utterly lame and unimposing killer, who looks so ridiculous with the coma device still strapped to his head that he gets quite more laughs than scares by his appearance and really settles into this one quite weakly. It's hardly off to a good start when we find ourselves treating the killer as a joke, and the other flaws only enhance that since this one is just interminably boring and lifeless. There's hardly any action at all within this since the first half tends to run through her experiments at the hospital before finally just getting to the house at the forty-minute mark as the useless side-tangents of the killer's stop along the way and the detectives spouting pointless scientific jargon at each other make up the rest of the running time in the first half.
This is naturally spurred on by the criminally low body count that never really gives this one a chance to let loose with the splatter that would've helped the running time along here and in the end, there's just not enough action to really get this one going at all. The last flaw here is the overall cheapness of the film, both in regards to the locations and sets but also the overall quality of the rest of the special effects as the kills are all off-screen, the design is pretty bad and overall this one never really had a chance to do much good for itself.
Overview: 0.5/5
Utterly banal and worthless slasher effort that has very little worthwhile about it, this one ranks as one of the worst films in the entire genre with only a few select entries coming in lower. There's really only something of worth here for those that are true slasher, holiday-horror, or franchise completists while those that don't fall into any of those approaches should outright avoid.
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