La nuit du saigneur

Last night me and my fellow film students decided to watch this film just for fun. It starts off brilliantly with one of the funniest murders I have ever seen in a film. Then it went downhill till it hit rock bottom. The lighting was the worst I have ever seen. Half the time you can't see a thing. When you can it's obvious that someone is just shining a torch on them. The acting is so bad it's not even funny. The characters themselves are seriously bizarre. The guitar playing idiot kid with his face painted white you would imagine is going to be the weirdest character in the family. But no! It turns out that the whole family is messed up. A bunch of alcoholic nymphomaniacs who can't get enough Valium. Then there's the killer. We are given that he is an escaped mental patient. He also happens to be a bodybuilder who can't help but laugh hysterically when he murders people. I've watched a lot of bad movies but I couldn't bring myself to watch this to the end. This is seriously not worth watching.

I rented this for a sleepover with my friend Cait with one of those Mondo movies. (Ugh, how gross. We couldn't even finish it.) We watched this first, though. And I must say, it was quite cheesy.

This family of all twenty-somethings and older (who seem like a group of friends) get together at this in-the-middle-of-nowhere ranch for Thanksgiving. At the same time, a psychopath escapes from the mental ward, and is out to kill. And what do you know, he stumbles upon the Bradley's, this somewhat disfunctional and weird family. One by one, he kills them off after those cheesy stalking scenes where apparently nobody can see out the corner of their eye. (And if you like that stuff, definitely see "The Last Slumber Party." Those girls were as oblivious as Helen Keller.)

This is pretty standard, all up to the mediocre ending. You really aren't missing anything if you don't see this, and anyway, I've seen better. Much better. I say, skip it.

The only remotely good scene in this film is when the killer mows down an old granny crossing the street. But it's downhill from there. The killer is a beefy muscle-bound type who laughs like a madman each time he kills. Nothing much really happens in the film. The killer makes his way to a house in the countryside where people are having their thanksgiving dinner, and stalks around the house in darkness slowly bumping everyone off. To cover for the lack of budget (meaning lack of gore) almost every death scene was shot in the dark. There's not even a cheesy decapitated head to laugh at. There's nothing. No entertainment value whatsoever. The stalking around in the dark is tediously dull and without suspense.

Slasher fans should avoid this unless you're a completest, in fact any sane person should avoid it. I'm starting to get sick of seeing all these "lost" slasher films that turn out to be bore-fests, why do I bother?

1981 was a memorably dire year. We had assassination attempts on The President and The Pope. A cement walkway in Kansas City fell, crushing over one hundred people. The first cases of AIDS were reported, California was beset by ravenous fruit-flies, and hundreds of Beirut civilians were wiped-out during Israeli bombings. In select theaters, audiences were subjected to a slasher-film atrocity concerning a musclebound PCP freak who escapes from a nuthouse and proceeds to successively kill off members of a family at their Thanksgiving dinner. That film was HOME SWEET HOME.

Groan in pain while you watch famed fitness instructor Jake Steinfeld flex his acting muscles as the cackling killer...somehow he manages to deliriously overplay a character who has virtually no dialog whatsoever. The circumstantial humor in Steinfeld's towering inferno of ham-handed histrionics is, however, the sole glimmer of virtue in this unbearable bagatelle, a bland early entry in the slasher cycle which is surprisingly spare on gore and nudity.

Potentially gratifying for ultra-masochistic bad movie fans, I suppose...in this capacity, I might suggest watching it back-to-back with THE FREEWAY MANIAC.

3.5/10

Surely telling you the annoying guy got killed isn't a spoiler! I mean, the film itself sets up all these potential sex scenes, and then this guy dressed like a KISS member, playing a guitar, shows up and ruins everything. I was more worried that he wouldn't survive until the killer turned up!

The killer is a buffed up muscle man who shoots PCP under his tongue and laughs all the time. In the first few minutes he kills a drunkard and runs over an old woman. If you like watching serious slasher flicks then you might as well give up on this one because the tongue is rigid within the cheek. With the guitar playing moron (named Mistake), the fat business partner and the wailing Latin lady, this film is played for fun and not much else.

Truly, it ain't a classic by all means, but when one of the potential 'heros' syphoned gasoline from another car, then gets crushed when the killer jumps on him, you're not talking about high class cinema, but I couldn't help but like this (really) stupid film. At least you can watch it in the knowledge that the really annoying characters (namely Mistake) are going to be killed. I was surprised the killer just didn't shove that guitar right up his arse, because that's what I wanted to do!

An average slasher film, but it's aware of the cheese level, and wallows in it, and it's worth a watch at least.