Rating: C
Dir: Rolfe Kanefsky
Star: Craig Peck, Wendy Bednarz, Mark Collver, Bonnie Bowers
Though he’d directed a feature (“comedic whodunnit” Murder in Winter) as a high-school project, this was Kanefsky’s first “proper” movie, made at the ripe old age of twenty-one. I don’t know what you were doing at that age, but I wasn’t even writing a fanzine at that point in my life, so credit to Rolfe there. On the other hand… it’s pretty much what you would expect from a film written and directed by a 21-year-old. The world is probably a better place, because I did not make a feature at his age. [On that basis, I’m left even more in awe of The Evil Dead, since Sam Raimi departed teenagedom just before shooting of that began, turning 20] Then again, Rolfe has B-movie celluloid in his veins: his father Victor edited Bloodsucking Freaks.
It begins with a nicely-shot nightmare which takes place in a video shop, before we get the meat of the plot. Seven friends get out of college and head out to a remote cabin by a lake, owned by one of their families. There are three couples, plus Mike (Peck), and we quickly discover the reason that Mike is single. He’s a fountain of knowledge gained from an extensive knowledge of horror movies, and is rapidly convinced that this getaway is doomed to end in their deaths. His friends are unimpressed by Mike’s relentless doom-mongering, and continue going out for moonlit walks, skinny-dipping and behaving in other ways calculated to tweak the noses of the horror gods.
There’s just one problem: Mike is right. For an alien creature has crashed to earth not far away, and has made its way to the cabin. It’s a weird creature, somewhere between a frog and an octopus (wisely, it’s largely only shown briefly and in fragments). It leaves green slime around the place, fires hypnotic lasers from its eyes and, Mike gradually realizes, it is intent on mating with Earth females. But if anyone can be considered well-prepared for such an eventuality, it’s going to be Mike. Certainly, more so than one of the final girls, Stacy (Bowers), who spends almost the entire second-half running around in her bikini.
This pre-dates Scream by five years, so probably deserves greater credit for the whole meta-horror thing than it has received. Though that would depend on whether you find that kind of thing a laudable development. I didn’t like it in Scream, and it’s only sporadically amusing here. Kanefsky’s main mistake is too often thinking that repeating clichés, then pointing them out, is an adequate substitute for actual humour. Can’t say I agree. The film is on better ground when going full-meta, such as when Stacy says to Mike, “So you’re saying we’re in a movie,” to which he replies, “It’s a distinct possibility.” Given he later uses a boom-mic to swing away from the alien, hard to argue with Mike. Yet I’m not sure this, or the low-fi charms of the alien, are a significant improvement over all the less self-aware spam-in-a-cabin films.