Killer Party

[Finch]

TBC

[domino harvey]

Killer Party (William Fruet 1986)
Sorority sisters and frat brothers decide to throw their April Fools Day shindig in an abandoned house where a former pledge died twenty years earlier, and, well, you may have already guessed how that will work out for them in this slasher that nevertheless prides itself on faking-out the audience regardless. To start with, the film opens with two head-fakes (which is two too many). And then it seems like the film has arrived on a comparatively novel idea

Spoiler

in that it appears that the nice girl who is being set up as our Final Girl is actually the killer,

which is a fun riff on the conventions of these movies; but then, while that turns out to be technically accurate, the film decides to complicate it by

Spoiler

making her demon-possessed, with the film then turning into one of those bad post-Exorcist horror movies.

The weirdness and uneasy jigsaw construction of several different ideas is no doubt down to this being one of the slashers with a big studio backing it, MGM. It’s not hard to see a dozen different executives contributing notes that actually got used, to the film’s detriment. I will say that it takes a certain kind of perversity and/or cluelessness to go almost the entire film barely killing anyone and then offing everyone one right after another in a five minute span with no suspense even attempted. This is a royal mess, but a memorable one, for whatever that’s worth.

Also

Spoiler

The cover is a spoiler…

[swo17]

I think the specs listed in the first post are for Stéphane

[Finch]

Yeah, Arrow's site is all over the place this morning and I didn't realise immediately.