Quote:
Originally Posted by Demdike@Cult Labs  The Slayer (1982) The Slayer was the first Vipco sell-thru tape i ever bought so i've always had a soft spot for this often clumsy film.
The main problem director JS Cardone, best known as the screenwriter for remakes of Prom Night and The Stepfather, is the lack of characters. With only four central protagonists to work with the killings have to be rather spaced out during the film's 85 minute running time, and there aren't really enough bloody deaths to sustain it, so we are left with many a sequence being far too talky and others of bland exposition "It's from my dreams".
Having been negative so far the film just about gets by without becoming boring. It's beach front location is interesting and well utilized and Cardone gives proceedings an almost Gothic atmosphere.
Having said all this i was delighted to have seen The Slayer again after all these years and more than pleased to add it to my dvd collection.
I may be mistaken but i was under the impression the Beyond Terror / Vipco disc was of very poor picture and sound quality. I didn't find this at all. The 4:3 print was fine, a little speckly in places but extremely watchable. It must be noted though that i do sit through and enjoy some of the worst looking dvd releases known to man courtesy of our friends at Popflix and Pendulum Pictures etc and have yet to discover blu-ray. |
Good to see mention of 'The Slayer' again, Dem - although it's a well known film, I always feel it's a little underappreciated these days. Of course, the triteness you point out is clearly there, and with characters as lively as soggy cardboard it's no wonder its often dismissed as an eighties remnant... but there's just something about the atmosphere, which for me is quite strange - misty, windswept and doomed, with a heightened sense of claustrophobia as it crawls to its climax. Like 'Don't Go In The House', it's a film I often return to at this time of year. Reminds me somehow of walking along the Autumnal seafront of an abandoned, depopulated Morecambe (if Morecambe were an American island haunted by a dream demon) - concrete yuckyness and dead fish. Might have to get it out again.