Gotta love sleazy 70s horror films. For the second time today I'm immersing myself in trashy 70s gore and sleaze, and I love it. This is another movie I've been wanting to see for awhile, but I never got around to it for whatever reason. So many horror movies, so little time, I suppose. Luckily I've managed to catch up on a lot of those movies for the challenge this month, so here we go again.
This movie is about a woman, a famous figure skater, who is getting married to a man she hasn't known for very long. Love at first sight, I guess. One of the guests at the wedding is very much unwanted, however. It's a man from her past, who seems to be a crazed and dangerous man who is definitely not happy with her for getting married. He tries to track her down, and when he finds her, horrible things start to happen.
Of course, this movie gives a woefully inaccurate definition of Schizophrenia right at the beginning, souring my opinion of the movie before it even begins. A sleazy horror movie I watched last year called "Bleed" actually did a much better job portraying the reality of what Schizophrenia is like, which impressed me, because it didn't have to do that, but it did, and that attention to detail elevated the plot of the whole movie for me. This movie seems basically like the filmmakers' thought process went as follows "this killer is crazy, all crazy is same crazy, schizo is better title than just "crazy," so killer must be schizophrenic." Not impressed, movie. Know your shit or don't bother to give a definition at all. It was the 70s, though, so maybe knowledge of mental health has just come a long way since then and I shouldn't be putting my current standards of accuracy onto an older movie. But they could have just made the killer crazy and not tried to sound all sophisticated by having a shrink give a definition at the beginning of their movie which is just 50 shades of wrong. I'd have been much happier if they'd just made a gory horror flick called "Schizo" and not tried to sound all intellectual about it. Stay in your lane, movie.
Apart from the wrong wrong wrongity-wrongness of the psychobabble crap, the movie isn't bad. The acting is pretty good, and the filmmakers ratchet up the tension by making the scary crazy guy act erratically, so we're never sure what his intentions are for the main character and what he's going to do when he finally gets to her. I like the main character, she's in love but she wants to retain her own identity and focus on her career too, which makes her relatable to me. Her fiance/husband is kind of a tool, but he's ok I guess, just perhaps a tad too in love with himself. He also blames the fact that they don't know much about each other before getting married on her, because it's all one person's job to open up in a relationship, especially if she knows he's a douche who plans on using everything he knows about her past as a reason not to believe her when she says there's a killer stalking her. Nice one, asshole.
There are some great tense moments in this movie. Some kill scenes where gore is scarce but still used to great advantage. There's also a scene that takes place at a seance that gave me chills (and I watch a lot of these movies, so that's something I didn't expect). I like the sense of mystery here, too. I got the sense that the movie was hiding stuff from us, so I was figuring out possible twists in my head while I watched it. I love mysteries, so that's a lot of fun for me. Ultimately the ending of the movie isn't totally unexpected, but it's still well done and kinda freaky, so in spite of the silly pseudo-psychobabble crap at the beginning, I wound up enjoying this movie.
No comments:
Post a Comment