Le rendez-vous de la peur

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!

Um, yeah. It's puerile… not wonder why the fetchingly detailed video artwork is eye-catching as it draws you in (and how many times have we've been fooled by that?) to only to find when you watch it. Boy what a mistake! Hey a friend gave this one to me (with a smile on his face), but in all honesty I don't know what to make of 'Appointment with Fear'? If this was supposed to be a supernatural slasher, it wasn't much of one. So randomly bizarre and tacky, but even more so deadly dull. It does seem to have a lot going on with something always happening, but the terribly thought-out material (it's a wonky script) is a complete shambles with numerously pointless developments (what was the deal with bum they virtually kept as a pet?) and unrelated padding that throws out ideas with nothing to entirely back it up. All of this build-up and all we get is one abysmally meandering set-up after another with no real groundwork. Tacked on is a lame climax, with an even lamer freeze ending. Ugh!

The concept which has a criminal lying in hospital in a coma, but managing to leave his body in a spiritual sense and go after his baby (no not teleporting, but in his mysteriously white van in psychical form) to murder it for the reason of staying the king (something of a Egyptian Demigod) for another year. He takes care of his wife, but the baby finds itself in the care of some hopeless teenagers that spend the night at forlorn house in the desert. Soon they find themselves caught in the terror in trying to protect the baby, as a lone, worn-out police detective is the only one who they can turn to.

I guess you call it plain dumb, or simply an interesting idea poorly realized, which has got to count for something. Director Alan Smithee (yeah I wouldn't blame them not wanting their real name tagged to this project) shoddily puts this low-end feature together with blotchy imagery and distracting techniques. The unhinged music score is overkill, editing around certain sequences is jerky and it seems to lose concentration with the camera closing in on redundant images… e.g. dolls? However it demonstrates a fluid glide in some looping camera shots when centering on the action at the remote villa. Then you even begin to question that! Atmosphere is non-existent with inept staging of the deaths (as most of them occur off-screen) and what we do see is impulsively ramshackle. They're bloodless and tensionless… oh no that's not good and our good old villain looks quite plain (while trying hard to evoke a serious face of pure evil!) and what he does is no better… driving about or just loitering around. As for the performances they're mainly annoyingly drab and oddball, however I didn't mind Michele Little as the main heroine, even though her constantly recording sounds with her microphone got numbing. The cast is made up by some faces that appeared in other horror/teen features like Debi Sue Voorhees, Kerry Remsen and Michael Wyle. James Avery shows up in minor part too.

"Appointment with Fear" is a drawn-out and hackneyed appointment that's well worth missing.

Don't get too excited... this isn't an obscure movie by director John Carpenter, but rather a supernatural slasher from producer Moustapha Akkad, who fails to repeat the success he had with Michael Myers. This movie is such a mess that original director Ramsey Thomas was fired, with Akkad re-shooting and re-editing the film, slapping the resultant cinematic turd with the shameful pseudonym Alan Smithee. When a horror film gets the Alan Smithee treatment, you know it must be bad.

The film opens with a man staking out a house; he leaves his car to place a tracking device on a station-wagon. A woman emerges from a house carrying a baby; she drives off in the station-wagon, the man following in his car. They are followed by another man in a van.

Next we are introduced to Carol (Michele Little), who is using a parabolic microphone to record her ditzy friend Heather (Kerry Remsen), who is across the street, putting on an interpretive dance/mime performance for some old age pensioners (senior citizens love interpretive dance - who knew?). While this is going on, the woman with the baby pulls up at a nearby house; she gets out of the car, and hides her baby in a bush; soon after, the man in the van arrives. He wants to know where the baby is, and when the woman won't tell him, he sticks her in the side with a big knife and skedaddles.

Having finished her dance routine, Heather goes to see what is wrong with the woman, who has slumped on some steps. Barely alive, she tells Heather, 'Don't let him harm my baby', and hands the nipper over. Now, at this point, any rational person would call the police and give the baby to the authorities, but Heather is ditzy, remember? She keeps the kid, taking it to a party where she, Carol, and some other friends are celebrating their graduation. This makes the girls targets for the man in the van, who is actually the physical manifestation of the spirit of Attis (Garrick Dowhen), a patient in an asylum who has mastered the art of astral projection; he is the father of the baby and believes that he must kill it in order to remain being the God of Nature. Are you still with me?

Now this might not seem all that strange to those who actively seek out bizarre horror films, but there's more weirdness - so much more - guaranteed to have you scratching your head in bewilderment. There's Norman the philosophical bum (Danny Dayton), who sleeps in the back of Carol's pick-up truck; Bobby (Michael Wyle), Carol's love interest, who rides around on his motorcycle with a female mannequin in his sidecar, and who likes to play hide and seek before sex; and Cowboy (Vincent Barbour), boyfriend of Carol's pal Samantha (Pamela Bach-Hasselhoff), who, in the film's most oddball moment, appears outside the house where the girls are partying and joins a dance troupe in gyrating to some bad '80s music.

When Attis shows up for the finalé, the dancers vanish as mysteriously as they appeared, but Carol isn't helpless: she has her handy microphone to help locate the villain, and an even handier AK-47 which she uses to shoot the place up. She eventually destroys Attis by impaling him with a very pointy may-pole, the killer disappearing in a cloud of leaves. During all of this, the man with the tracking device, who we learn earlier on to be police sergeant Kowalski (Douglas Rowe), turns up to take the baby into care - but why are the child's eyes glowing green?

All of this nonsense is told in such a disjointed, eccentric manner, with wooden performances and lousy dialogue, that the film might possibly be the worst horror ever; either that or it's a surreal work of misunderstood genius. I'm torn between giving it 1/10 for being totally crap, or 6/10 for being a one-of-a-kind oddity. The only fair thing for me to do average these scores out to 3.5/10, although I am forced to round this down to 3 for only delivering brief side boob from the well-endowed Deborah Voorhees, who happily went nude for Friday the 13th: A New Beginning.

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.

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