Hi, it’s Burl here to review a slasher picture that I never
thought of as really a slasher picture at all! I saw The Deadly Intruder many
years ago, probably at my friend Dave’s house after we’d rented it from the
local 7-11! Ha ha! And I remembered it as being a pretty boring picture that
never quite delivered whatever it was that Dave and Doug and I and my other
horror-loving friends were hoping for!
Well, watching the picture again recently, I’m not sure why
I didn’t think of this as a slasher picture! It most definitely is, although of
the mystery slasher variety, a bit like a country-fried version of Too Scared To Scream! We never see the face of the killer as he’s doing
his deeds, and as the movie progresses we’re presented with two possible
candidates: a red herring (bright siren red, in fact) and the guy it probably is
instead!
The action takes place in and around Midvale, a great name
for a slasher-beset town! I’m surprised they didn’t go with Haddonvale or at
least Midfield, as all their other efforts seem directed towards aping Halloween as closely as possible! Midvale is home to Jesse, a
young woman who lives alone in a ranch house and likes to give dinner parties!
A twitchy, greasy fellow in an army jacket is hanging around asking for
sandwiches and chopping wood with the axe Jesse leaves lying around: why, could
this be the killer?
Jesse’s dinner guests include none other than Danny
Partridge, who runs Midvale’s most exclusive fashion boutique! He brings along
his wife and also his newest employee, a handsome fellow who claims to be a
Canadian magazine writer (for the "Canadian Star," ha ha) who takes retail jobs as a way to move freely amongst the
common people he likes to write articles about!
In the meantime, the population of Midvale is being reduced
in a random and rather sadistic fashion! The murders, which are mostly crowded
into the first half of the picture (one way at least in which it’s unlike Halloween) aren’t very bloody, and there
are next to no Special Makeup Effects to be seen unless they were hiding
somewhere in the gloomy photography; but they’re kind of mean-spirited, like
when the friendly and trusting garage mechanic is slowly crushed under the car
he’s working on! There’s also a guy stabbed in the eye with a screwdriver, a
lady whose face is pushed into a running car engine and a sink drowning featuring a loose nightgown; and, in
what may or may not have been intended as some sort of meta-reference, Danny
Partridge gets his head rammed through a TV screen!
This is not a very good movie! No suspense is generated, the
script is terrible, the photography (early work from the same guy who shot Witchtrap), or at least the video
transfer, is often very murky, and the second half of the movie, in which Jesse
gets kidnapped by the greasy hobo, is boring! Also, though the heroine does
survive, the open, cynical ending recalled that of The Dorm That Dripped Blood! Ha ha, I’m going to have to watch a slasher
picture where the killer gets his just desserts at the end, just for a little
taste of catharsis!
It was nice to see that old veteran Stuart "Crazy Mama" Whitman as the fearsome,
bearded sheriff, and I guess there’s some genuine 1980s slasher atmosphere on
display here, but there’s not much else I can think of to praise this picture
for! I’m going to give The Deadly
Intruder one extraordinarily obvious body double!
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