Appointment with Fear

This movie is indeed an incoherent mess, but it's so weird in its very concept that I can't believe it is merely an exercise in incompetence (despite the bad reviews and the "Alan Smithee" directorial credit). But neither is it one of those annoying, would-be "cult" films that tries very self-consciously to be "weird". It is UNIQUELY weird, which is the mark of a TRUE cult film, even if it obviously doesn't have any kind of a cult following.

It starts with a strange detective following an escaped mental patient who is driving a white van (shades of producer Mustapha Akkad's most famous movie). The mental patient stops to bloodlessly stab his ex-wife to death while she's sitting on someone's porch with their infant son. The dying women gives the infant to a ditsy teenager, who has just been performing a mime routine at the birthday party of a cranky old man next door. The ditsy teen gets a ride home with her very cute friend (Michelle Little), who doesn't seem to notice she is now carrying an infant. The friend is pretty weird herself--she constantly eavesdrops on people with a directional microphone and she has a pet hobo named "Norman" sleeping in the back of her flat-bed pickup truck (a "Crazy Ralph" type given to strange, philosophical soliloquies). Rounding out the cast is the cute girl's would-be boyfriend, who rides around on a motorcycle with a female mannequin in the sidecar, and a couple--a guy named "Cowboy" and a blonde girl--who are frequently playing cards and having sex, sometimes doing both at the same time. Eventually this kinda turns into a slasher movie as the killer comes after his newborn son, but a very bizarre one featuring astral projection and the Egyptian god of nature. . .

The most recognizable actor here might be the busty Debbisue Vorhees who played "Jason's" most gratuitously naked murder victim in "Friday the 13th Part V". She has a similarly perfunctory role in this as a casual friend of lead, who, while waiting for her friend to come home, strips down to her panties for a quick dip in the pool for no apparent reason, and is subsequently murdered. (It's not a much of a part, but I doubt anyone will complain). It's also nice to see Brioni Ferrell, who was memorable in Roger Corman's "Student Nurses", but never did much after that. She plays the mother of the ditsy girl, and is usually clad in a skimpy bikini for reasons that have nothing really to do with the plot. There are more boobs than blood in this one (but not really enough of either), and the action comes to a dead halt several times for a synchronized New Wave dance routine or some other weirdness. It probably won't appeal much to hardcore slasher fans, but I actually kinda liked it for some reason. . .

A thoroughly disagreeable entry into the slasher genre, this film began life as "Deadly Presence". After the producers saw how gawd-awful the film really was, they fired Thomas and shot some more footage. Gowan's detective character and a bunch of others were added in a sort of parallel story and the whole thing renamed "Appointment With Fear." Aside from a couple of performances, this cinematic disaster's only redeeming value is its score. Written by ace composer Andrea Saparoff, the music is the only thing lending a little eeriness to what is otherwise an hour and a half of scare-free tedium.

Recommended audience: Weevils, chunks of granite, D-cell batteries and very very minor Egyptian deities only.

Horrible, dreadful stuff. You know you're in for a film with little inspiration behind it when a mid-80's dance number in inserted in what could have turned out to be the best scene of the whole flick-the sex scene!

Sad and insipid; it makes other horror films of the 1980's look great in comparison.

Don't make the same mistake I did, please… If some person, whether it's a good buddy or a complete stranger, ever tells you not to watch this film, then take the advice and DON'T WATCH THIS FILM! "Appointment with Fear" easily ranks in the top 3 most retarded movies ever made and there's more than one reason why it ended up being directed under the pseudonym of "Alan Smithee". The basic premise is imbecile to begin with, not one dialogue in the entire stupid script makes any sense, and – despite being labeled as horror – it's completely gore-free and without tension. Worst of all are the insufferable characters, which give you the impression that this whole film-project had to be one giant lame and very unfunny joke. Allow me to introduce some of them: The 'hero' is a cop who wears suits that already went out of fashion in the 1930's and he has the strange habit of setting his own car on fire by accident. The female lead is a teenager who allows bums to live in the back of her pick-up truck and, as some kind of hobby, she monitors random people's conversations with a giant (and not very discrete) microphone. Her best friend likes to paint her face blue for no reason and she also give mime-shows to her senile grandparents. The heroine's boyfriend, to finish with, is a long-haired loser who keeps a modeling dummy in the sidecar of his motorcycle… Why? Because it's cool, of course! The "plot" revolves on a crazy killer who's in a coma but at the same time he walks around killing people whilst looking for his baby-boy son. He's supposed to be an Egyptian Demigod, even though he looks like an ordinary idiot. The whole thing is slow and every newly introduced sub plot goes nowhere real fast. The music is horrible; crappy 80's dancing is shamelessly used as padding and even the brief nudity-flashes are boring. Oh, and did I mention it's entirely gore-free? What a total piece of crap!

An Egyptian king of nature must kill his newborn baby in order to keep the title for another year. He'll have to knock off a few teens in this mid-80's sleepy slasher - Appointment with Fear

In the middle of the day, a woman is followed by a man in a white van and then stabbed to death with a few bystanders around that witness the incident. Just before she dies, the woman gives her small baby to one of our main characters Heather and tells her to take care of it and keep it safe. Police officer Kowalski knows who the man who did it, but the problem is that the same man was locked away in a psychiatric hospital and all drugged up when the killing happened. There is mention of astral projection and the ability make things happen in the world despite not physically being there to do it (out of body actions).

We see the man in the white van following around the films heroine Carol and the other teenage bystanders from the murder earlier in the day (plus some of their friends). It appears that the man is trying to kill his baby because of an Egyptian power that makes him king of nature for another year if he can accomplish the murder. The remainder of the film is the man following the teens up to a large house party they are having in order to kill the baby that Heather took at the beginning.

Let's be real, Appointment with Fear is not a very good movie at all technically speaking. The quality of this movie is terrible when it comes to editing. We get strange voiceovers that don't match the actual voice of the actor who is talking. Plus there are a few times you can catch a shadow of the director or camera person in the frame. The actual plot and storyline with the astral projection serial killer is not terrible, but isn't used as much as it could have been which makes it overall super weak. There was not one standout in the acting department that was anywhere close to competent except for maybe Douglas Rowe as Sgt. Kowalski.

I did want to give this movie a rating of 4 at least, because it didn't start all that bad for a lacklustre 80's slasher. But an hour in, you at least expect SOMETHING to have happened to push the story along and to see more murders. Well none of that happens and the movie just kind of falls into a complete mess category for me.

3/10