Director: Fred Walton
Cast: Charles Durning, Carol Kane, Colleen Dewhurst, Troy Beckley
Have I Seen it Before: Never. In fact, if Columbia/Tri-Star hadn’t mae the Blu Ray packaging look like a well worn copy at a VHS rental store, I might have missed it for the rest of my life, or at least until it came up on rotation for Beyond the Cabin in the Woods at some other point in time.
Did I Like It: I liked twenty minutes of it, but that is all to say, no.
Carol Kane is so good at the beginning, and that first act is so taut it’s no wonder to see how it inspired Scream (1996) and its sequels just as much as Halloween (1978). But then the movie jumps ahead seven years for reasons never fully justified, and meanders in a dreary, fatigued cat and mouse game between an incompetent police detective turned PI (Durning) and the killer (Beckley).
I had the slightest bit of hope that when Kane—now married with children her own—returns for the final half hour of the film, things might be looking up. It probably would not be enough to get me to like the film, but at the very least it could have finished strong.
No such luck. Poor Kane succumbed to the sensibility of the rest of the film and lurches through the final scene turning into one of the more frustrating characters in a horror movie. People often moan and wail about horror movie characters doing “stupid” things. I’ve always fully been able to imagine a person in aa stressful situation doing things that might be ill-considered. Kane’s character appears to have entirely forgotten about her traumatic experience in the film’s opening and behaves as if certain, instinctual parts of her brain had never been fully connected.
So to sum up, a reasonably good twenty minutes, followed by 70 minutes of almost relentless bullshit, and one good Blu Ray cover that in retrospect… doesn’t feel that good.
That all being said: if they want to go for a legacy sequel with later-day Kane bringing her Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt to a self-aware slasher, I’d be happy to be first in line.