1981 horror, dir. Joe Dante, Dee Wallace, Patrick MacNee:
IMDb /
allmovie. After Karen the
news anchor has a near-fatal encounter with a serial killer, she and
her husband go to her therapist's retreat centre in the countryside…
There are some early 1980s films that already feel like 1980s
films. And there are some, like this one, that feel like 1970s films
that happened to get made late; both the introductory sequence,
straight from the pre-video-recorder good old days when people had to
leave the house to watch pornographic films, and the way the
therapeutic retreat turns out to be something more like a swingers'
commune, seem very much of that earlier era. (Also, that
post-Production-Code reaction by Terribly Serious Filmmakers that yay,
they can show naked breasts now, is very much something I associate
with 1970s film; by the 1980s it was no longer a way of expressing
transgression.)
And as a result I think Patrick MacNee is doing something quite subtle
here: rather than try to reprise his best-known role as John Steed, he
plays a sort of tawdry second-rater who plays off the upstanding
image, and when he's revealed not to be one of the good guys somehow
it's not as much of a surprise as it could have been.
Joe Dante was mostly at this point known for Piranha (1978), though
he'd later go on to direct Gremlins and Innerspace. This was the
peak of Dee Wallace's film career; her next role would be as Mom in
E.T. (for which I hope she was at least paid a lot, because most of
her roles after that were some sort of background woman). And of
course this is Robert Picardo's film début as Eddie the serial killer.
But anyway, this swinger commune turns out actually to be a werewolf
commune, and the faction argument over living in peace versus trying
to take over the world doesn't get as much screen time as I'd like.
The local good time had by all is after Karen's husband, and
something is stalking around at night (and even though Karen's cold
she doesn't close the window). Meanwhile, Karen's assistants are
trying to gather material for a background story on the dead serial
killer, only to find that his body's gone missing from the morgue and
there seems to be a connection with that commune too…
But I think the plot is mostly there to build tension for the big set
pieces, the werewolf sex scene and the transformation of Eddie the
serial killer (who turns out to be alive and well of course). I'll
grant the latter is very well mounted, with a series of air bladders
under the latex prosthetics, but I can't help feeling that there's an
awful lot of "enjoy watching the terrified woman" mixed in with it. (I
know, perhaps I shouldn't expect more from horror, and this was
released during the "video nasties" fuss in England, but sometimes I'm
pleasantly surprised.)
But it does in the end feel as though it's mostly scaffolding for
those and a few other big moments. Most of the characters go out of
their way to lose my sympathy, and it's all very downbeat. Sequels,
inevitably, followed.
I talk about this film further on
Ribbon of Memes.