It’s October. Time to talk horror. This year I’m reviewing a different horror movie each day of the month.
The Slayer opens with a series of disjointed images involving a redheaded woman who’s being attacked by… something. Whatever it is, we can tell it’s pretty gnarly and the film (at least the uncut version) isn’t going to shy away from the good stuff. The only problem? Scenes containing the good stuff are few and far between.
It turns out that scene was just a dream, which immediately reminds us of A Nightmare on Elm Street, an observation which will beg even more comparisons by the time you get to the cheat of an ending. Just don’t call it a ripoff because Wes Craven’s franchise was still two years away, believe it or not. I wish I could say The Slayer is ahead of its time in that regard, but that would be more praise than it deserves.
The entire premise: four people take a vacation on an island, but they’re not alone. We’re not talking a human slasher, but someone (or something) supernatural like Freddy Krueger. Even so, this killer is not above using low-tech methods such as bashing a victim’s head in with an oar. Like most movies of its kind, it’s painfully slow to get started, but early on there’s a delicious slice of cheese: upon arriving via chartered plane, one character gazes out the window at the island and remarks, “It’s surrounded by water.” And if there’s anything the filmmakers want to make abundantly clear, it’s this: “There’s no phone service on the island!”
Following a disappointingly tame sex scene, the redhead’s lover wanders into a dark, creepy basement alone. (I’m expecting to see a lot of creepy basements and cellars this month so let’s call it a trope rather than a cliché.) When you only have a handful of characters to kill in your scrappy little horror movie, you’ve got to concoct ways of splitting them up and killing them one by one so you don’t blow your load too soon. Rinse and repeat until you’re left with a final girl and we can all go home.
While The Slayer is little more than a standard horror movie of its time, it’s a fairly solid one and worth a watch. It’s suffering from many of the same problems films of this type almost always have, chief among them its plodding pace. But maybe it subconsciously planted the seed in Wes Craven’s head which would later become A Nightmare on Elm Street… but probably not.
Come back at midnight Central Time for the next movie.
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