No matter how hard I try, I just can't get away from the goddamn slasher genre this close to The Madness. I mean at this point, I should be dealing with sharp teeth, claws, and tentacles not someone dressed in a bear suit hackin'-and-slashin' their way through a group of nubile collegiate chicks.
Which is what you get with this film originally titled The Scaremaker and filmed two years before its actual release. The day after a homecoming basketball game and the victory party, an all-nighter scavenger hunt is held on the campus of a small Ohio college. But also in attendance is a killer, wearing the dancing bear costume of the school mascot whom gets killed, is around stalking a number of cheerleaders and killing them with a variety of sharp knifes. The campus chief security officer Mac-played by the legendary Hal Holbrook-whose daughter was a victim of a similar killer, tries to find out whose behind it before more killings happen.
That's pretty much it, story wise. It's a typical early-80s slasher that suffers from a prolonged build-up in between kill sequences(a problem which plagues The Prowler) and an absence of blood. However, unlike alot of movies of the genre, the acting is rather decent, buoyed by the presence of Hal Holbrook whose horror pedigree includes The Fog(1980) and Creepshow to go along with his appearances in Magnum Force and Wall Street.
<!--more-->
I actually found the characters engaging and likable, a rarity in films such as this. And the one thing I found odd was the fact there was no full front female nudity! How'd that happen? Overall, Girls Nite Out is hit and miss. Watch it only if you have an aching need to see some of the 80's lesser-known slashers.
1 comment:
Great movie! Glad you dug it. Hal Holbrook looks so lost in this one.
Post a Comment