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HEY EVERBODY ITS ME (4) and today we review ...80's horror slasher film #500183

yup its that time of year again, the leaves are changing colour and falling, the air is becoming crisp, and the birds are flying south SO that means time to watch a bagillion different slasher styled films lost to time ..... and here we have "MOONSTALKER" and I have to say the first 20 minutes or so had me hooked , having a slasher with an outfit/mash looking like he was from the cover of a quiet riot record ALSO from the 80's lol.... BUT THEN tragedy strikes !!!!!! The monstrous villain becomes ..... a ...normal ... looking cowboy with sunglasses ? ..... WOW that was a let down, probably a bigger let down than what my wife had on our wedding night .....

now over all its just a stander basic 80s slasher flick ..... for better or worse , nothing new , nothing special, so you know EXACTLY what to expect and what your getting, so if you love those styled films BAM heres another one to add to the list ...if your not into the classic tropes of "kids in the woods getting hacked up " then skip ....

sadly I don't have much to "review" here, everything is middle of the road safe, the acting is meh nothing too bad nothing too good , the lighting , nothing too bad nothing too good , the story ....middle road ....just everything is riding that center line trying to play it SUPER safe and they did , probably why this guy never became the next jason or freddy ...well playing it safe and HE TURNS INTO A COWBOY IN SUNGLASSES !!!!!!!!!!!! Literally an awesome character design in a straight jacked with this REALLY weird almost jackolantern with square eyes and mouth kind of head going on ...and an axe ....into .... urban keith ??? Boot scootin around just hacking up campers ? ...come on now .... so much potential just thrown out the window

so sadly ... imma HAVE to give this one a middle of the road score at 5/10 BUT wait theres more ! Because the ytook a great slasher look and then ....countrified it .... you get 2 points deducted ....so

3/10.

It's a shame that this film is not currently available on any video format because it is actually an enjoyable piece of '80's horror. The night winter forest locations look great and the cast appears to be having a fun time making the film. The females in the cast are all attractive and fine actresses, and some of the men (specifically detective Taylor and Harry, the father) are just plain hilarious. The gore effects are primitive but serviceable, and there are moments of genuine emotional connection between the characters that was rare for the genre at that post-"Halloween" time. Watching this film brings one back to a more innocent time when real effort was put into the exploitation genre.

"Moonstalker" aptly illustrates how and why the teen slasher ingloriously died at the end of the 1980s. Although always watchable and sometimes even reasonably amusing, it's a thoroughly uninspired and derivative effort. It starts with the opening credits music being yet another blatant rip-off of John Carpenter's iconic score for "Halloween". By the time "Moonstalker" got released, "Halloween" was more than a decade old, and literally the entire world had seen it, so find something new already! The next 10-15 minutes are hilarious, but mainly because the plot is so cliched and the performances are so atrociously bad. A middle-aged father (and heavy beer can consumer) insists on spending a primitive "back-to-nature" vacation with his reluctant family in a rusty old camper, so they install themselves at the edge of a wide backwoods area. The bickering family runs into an ogre named Pop, and he's hiding his psychopathic and bloodthirsty son Bernie in a caravan, tied up with chains and wearing a bag over his head. Pop occasionally lets Bernie out, for example to feast on dim-witted camper families, but then Pop unexpectedly dies from a heart-attack and Bernie suddenly finds himself unchained with the world at his feet! From then onward "Moonstalker" plays on familiar slasher turf, as Bernie heads straight towards a nearby camping site where a bunch of young summer camp counselors are having their annual initiation weekend. Freed from his dominant father, Bernie makes the terrible (albeit understandable) mistake of switching his strait-jacket and potato bag mask for a lumberjack shirt, a cowboy hat and a shiny pair of sunglasses. I reckon it's a far more comfortable outfit for him, but he does instantly lose all the charisma and scary effect of a savage backwoods killer, especially because the mask made him somewhat a look-alike of Jason Voorhees in "Friday the 13th part 2". Luckily his appetite for nasty killings is still there. The first few murders are dull and bloodless, but "Moonstalker" eventually meets the 80s gore quota thanks to several amputations, axe-murders and even a knife in someone's forehead. The sadistic campfire moment near the finale (you'll know it when you see it) is a delightful little horror detail, but it sadly doesn't rescue the film from sheer mediocrity.

Not to be confused with MOONSTRUCK (1988), I was yelling "Snap out of it" and slapping myself in the face by the time this regional horror flick was done. An old man keeps his mentally unstable son Bernie (Blake Gibbons) locked up in a trailer, only unleashing him when pop wants some tourists killed for new appliances. Unfortunately, hauling the newly acquired microwave causes ol' dad to die of a heart attack and Bernie is on his own. Naturally, he heads home and begins offing winter camp counselors in training that are near his abode. You won't get much from this Nevada lensed slasher from writer-director Michael O'Rourke until the last half hour, where it turns surprisingly bloody as Bernie chops everyone with an ax. There is a pretty cool looking image of Bernie chained up in a straight jacket with a hood on, but that gets abandoned early on when he removes it and dresses in a cowboy hat (making him look like Powers Boothe for some odd reason). Surprisingly, Gibbons survived this mess and went on to be a featured played on GENERAL HOSPITAL. Helmer O'Rourke wasn't as lucky, disappearing from directing after this one (although he did script the truly bizarre HELLGATE [1990] the next year).

In a straight-jacket, hood, chains and brandishing an axe, Moonstalker's crazed killer Bernie makes for a memorably imposing maniac, which is why it's a shame when he swaps this distinctive garb for a cowboy hat, dark glasses and and a plaid shirt. But even though he loses a lot of his mystique with this change of outfit, the drooling psycho remains as mean as ever, killing off most of the film's cast before the closing credits. Along the way there's quite a bit of hokey gore (rubbery body parts and splashes of blood), just a little female nudity (one of the girls strips off to take a shower with a young man), and, with the film taking place at a wilderness counselor's camp on a snowy mountain, lots of sitting around camp fires (in the film's most macabre moment, even the dead enjoy a sing-song around a roaring fire).

It's certainly no classic, but as low-budget late '80s slashers go, you could definitely do a lot worse than Moonstalker: the film is never boring, the sub-zero setting is a nice change from the traditional summer camp, the characters are likeable (the girls are all very pretty, which helps), and no-one is safe, which makes it one of the less predictable examples of the genre. Only the score really disappoints: it's a third-rate rip-off of John Carpenter's iconic music for Halloween.