Back in the early 1980’s, the UK press had a field day damning the content of video cassette tapes dubbed ‘Video Nasties’. These releases went under the radar of the British Board of Film Classification due to a loophole in distributing laws, and many decried their explicit content, relating them to various real-life crimes and claiming that their influence was responsible for warping the minds of the youth of society…
B-movie slashers – once you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all, right?
If you’re judging them in terms of originality, then yes, they are all very much the same – particularly those from the early part of the 1980s before censorship hysteria shackled the industry. In regards to technique, they are invariably cheap rip-offs of John Carpenter’s genre-defining Halloween, movies in which a masked killer stalks promiscuous teens through a series of heavily contrived set-pieces, while a perverted revelation draws ever nearer…
Intruder is something of an anomaly.
Made at the tail-end of the 1980s, it was released long after the MPAA had stepped in to curtail the wanton bloodlust of the slasher boom, an imposition on civil liberties that would lead to years of the kind of tepid horror that would turn the genre stale. Just as Jason Voorhees was setting sail for Manhattan in perhaps the most censored of an ever-diluting formula, director Scott Spiegel let rip with his supermarket splatterfest of ingeniously depraved proportions…
It took producers a whole year to renege on Friday the 13th’s promise that part IV would indeed be the final chapter, and the $22,000,000 it raked in – more than ten times its allocated budget – tells you exactly why.
Jason was far too big a draw to put to bed in 1984, and you have to believe that the studio was aware of this; in all likelihood, Jason’s demise was nothing more than a cynical marketing gimmick…
Killer Workout is a feminist’s nightmare.
Released at the tail end of the slasher boom, it manages to freshen an exhausted genre by using its most obvious ingredients to smother you like a sopping pair of heaving bosoms…
Made during the early 80s slasher boom, Hospital Massacre is another slash-by-numbers feature buried beneath the reams of explicit VHS tape, but one that retains a certain charm, most notably because of its impossibly beautiful leading lady Barbi Benton, a former glamour model who smoulders so hard she threatens to melt the screen…
