One of the most entertaining low-budget shockers of the early 1980s. No, its violence isn’t especially grotesque (though it’s got blood if you want it). No, its subject matter isn’t remarkably disturbing. No, it’s not likely to make you throw up or freak out (unless you’re the biggest wimp in the world).
But it is damn creepy. Or maybe a better word for it is uncomfortable.
Much of the credit goes to Susan Tyrrell’s jaw-dropping performance as movie history’s most psychotic aunt. She’s far gone and flipped out into Freak City. She’s been taking care of her nephew, Billy, since his parents got turned into well done Sizzler specials in a grisly car accident when he was three years old. Now, it’s fourteen years later and Billy’s a high school senior stud without a blemish or an ounce of fat on him and Susan Tyrrell, his mother-figure all of these years, has developed the unholy, pants-pissing HOTS for him. She wants him so bad it’s ruining her days and keeping her up nights. In her obsession to keep him chaste, she’s rivaled only by Carrie‘s mother, though her reasons are entirely different. When things don’t go her way, it’s time to start killing. Knives are fun and so are rocks from the creek out back of the house. Slipping sedatives into glasses of milk can be useful, as well.
None of the slashing or screaming here though is as nerve-wracking as a fairly weathered and crazy-eyed Susan Tyrrell making sexy faces and hiking up her dress for no real reason around the nephew. I saw this film in a theater, where it was the grand closer for an October horror marathon, and the crowd winced and exclaimed “ewwwww” at some of the merest twitches of Tyrrell’s eyebrows. She played us like a violin. She’s genuinely great here.
Adding to the raunchy fun is genre film mainstay Bo Svenson as the world’s most homophobic police detective. He’s the kind of sleazebag cop who makes you side with the criminal he’s pursing. Also, look for a young Bill Paxton as a high school jerk-off.
In the end, the weirdest thing about this oddball film is that the director isn’t some young maverick. Nope, it’s William Asher, one of the most successful American television sitcom directors of the 1950s and 60s Golden Age. Your favorite episodes of I Love Lucy or Bewitched were probably all directed by Asher. Meanwhile, his feature film work consisted mostly of Frankie & Annette beach party movies, absolutely none of which foreshadowed a southern-fried, incest, slasher flick in 1982. But I guess we all have a demon inside of us.